Reading List · Literary Prizes
These are the awards that the people who actually sell books vote for. Booksellers at independent shops across America nominate and choose them, and only books they had already put in customers’ hands on the Indie Next List are eligible. The awards ran from 2009 to 2019, stopped when BookExpo was cancelled, and came back in January 2026 after seven years off — which almost nothing written about them online mentions. Thirty-six books have won one of the three adult categories. This page has all of them.
By Lisanne Swart · 36 adult winners since 2009 · Fiction, nonfiction and debut · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 23 September 2026
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Quick answer
The Indies Choice Book Awards are voted for by the booksellers of America’s independent bookshops. They ran from 2009 to 2019, stopped when BookExpo was cancelled, and came back in January 2026 after a seven-year gap. There are three adult categories — fiction, nonfiction and debut — and thirty-six books have won one of them. Only Circe has ever won two categories in the same year. The most recent winners were announced on 8 April 2026, and the next set is due on 25 November 2026.
How this page chooses
This page has every winner in the three adult categories, so there is nothing to choose between: all thirty-six have an entry, oldest first, grouped by category.
The line in red under each book is a fact about it — another prize, a first, something about how it was published — not an opinion about it. The opinions are on my bookshelf.
The children’s and young adult categories and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards are not on this page; they are a separate research job. The audiobook category, which existed only in 2018 and 2019, comes up once, because Circe won it and the adult fiction category in the same year.
Oldest first, one for each award year. The line in red under each book is a fact about it, not an opinion about it.
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London, 1946. A writer looking for her next subject starts a correspondence with the members of a book club on Guernsey that was invented on the spot, during the German occupation, as an excuse for being out after curfew. The novel is told entirely in letters.
The first book to win in this category, when it was still called Best Indie Buzz Book.
Twin brothers, born in Addis Ababa to an Indian nun and a British surgeon, are orphaned at birth and raised by two doctors at the mission hospital where they were born. Both become doctors themselves. Verghese is a physician as well as a novelist, and the medicine in the book is exact.
The first winner under the name Adult Fiction; the category was renamed in 2010.
Jack is five and has spent his whole life in a single locked room with his mother, who by then has been held for seven years. He narrates. The first half is the room; the second is what happens after.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize the year before it won here.
Three students at Brown in the early 1980s: Madeleine, writing her thesis on the marriage plot in Victorian fiction, and the two men she is caught between, one of whom is manic-depressive and one of whom is trying to become a mystic.
His third novel, nine years after Middlesex.
North Dakota, 1988. A thirteen-year-old boy on an Ojibwe reservation sets out to find out who attacked his mother, and runs into the jurisdictional tangle that makes such crimes on tribal land so hard to prosecute.
Erdrich won the National Book Award for Fiction for the same novel in 2012.
Ursula Todd is born in England in 1910 and dies, and is born again, and lives a different length of a different life, over and over. The novel keeps rewinding through the same century.
Won the Costa Novel Award in 2013.
A blind French girl and a German boy conscripted for his talent with radios, moving towards each other through the Second World War and meeting in Saint-Malo in 1944.
Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015, the same year it won here.
A marriage told twice: the first half from his side, the second from hers, and the second half is not the same story.
A National Book Award finalist in 2015.
Cora runs from a Georgia plantation on an underground railroad that is, in this book, an actual railway under the ground. Each state she surfaces in is a different version of America.
Won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for the same novel.
A drive across Mississippi to collect a father from Parchman prison, narrated by a thirteen-year-old boy, by his mother, and by the ghost of a boy who died at Parchman decades earlier.
Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017.
The witch of the Odyssey, given a life of her own: born to Helios, despised by her family, banished by Zeus to an island, and left with centuries in which to find out what she is.
The only book to win two Indies Choice categories in one year: Adult Fiction and Audiobook. It was also the last Adult Fiction winner before the seven-year gap.
A novel in letters and emails, roughly 2012 to 2022. Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer in her seventies in Annapolis, writing to her brother, her estranged children, a former colleague and several real novelists, while her eyesight fails and her past catches up with her.
A debut novel that won the adult fiction category rather than the debut one. It had already taken the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel three weeks earlier, and went on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction in June.
The same twelve years. One writer appears twice.
The Puritans who sailed to Massachusetts in 1630, and what the country they founded made of them afterwards. Vowell writes history as an argument with the present.
Won when the category was still called Best Conversation Starter.
Percy Fawcett walked into the Amazon in 1925 looking for a lost city and never came out. Grann follows the search and then goes in after him.
Grann is the only writer to win this category twice.
Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner, crashes into the Pacific in 1943, survives forty-seven days on a raft and is then taken prisoner by the Japanese navy.
Her second book, nine years after Seabiscuit.
The chef of Prune in New York on how she got there: a childhood of enormous French dinners, a decade of catering jobs she was not qualified for, and a restaurant she opened without a plan.
Subtitled The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.
Twenty-six years old, her mother dead, her marriage over, she walks eleven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail with a pack she cannot lift and boots that do not fit.
The film with Reese Witherspoon followed in 2014.
The University of Washington eight-oar crew, sons of loggers and farmers, who rowed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Subtitled Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
A surgeon on what medicine does badly at the end of life: how it treats decline as a problem to be fixed rather than a thing people are living through, and what happens when the question changes from how long to what for.
Gawande is a surgeon and a staff writer for The New Yorker.
A letter to his fifteen-year-old son about living in a black body in America, written in the years of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
Won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015.
A German forester on what happens under a forest floor: the fungal networks that carry sugar between trees, the way a stump can be kept alive for centuries by its neighbours.
Translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst.
Oklahoma in the 1920s. The Osage were, per head, among the richest people in the world because of the oil under their land, and then they began to be murdered. The investigation made the reputation of the new Bureau of Investigation.
Grann’s second win in this category, eight years after The Lost City of Z.
A survivalist childhood in rural Idaho with no school, no doctors and no birth certificate; she left at seventeen for Brigham Young University and had a doctorate from Cambridge by 2014.
The last adult nonfiction winner before the gap.
A book-length essay that grew out of a single sentence El Akkad posted in October 2023. Written during the war in Gaza, it argues that the Western promise of freedom and justice has never been extended to Arabs, Muslims and immigrants, and asks what he owes his children in the middle of it.
His first work of nonfiction, after two novels, and the winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2025.
Called Best Author Discovery in 2009, Adult Debut from 2010, and Debut Adult since the relaunch. The same award throughout.
A mute boy on a Wisconsin farm where his family breeds a fictional line of dogs. His father dies, his uncle moves in, and the shape of Hamlet starts to show through.
Won when the category was still called Best Author Discovery.
Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. A young white woman starts secretly collecting the accounts of the black women who raise the town’s children.
Her first novel; she has published no other.
A Marine company takes, abandons and retakes a hill near the Laotian border in 1969. Marlantes served in Vietnam and worked on the book for thirty years.
Thirty years in the writing, and rejected many times before it was published.
A young doctor in an unnamed Balkan country crosses the border to collect her grandfather’s belongings, and reconstructs him through two stories he told her: the deathless man, and the tiger’s wife.
She won the Orange Prize for the same novel in 2011, at twenty-five.
Alaska in 1920. A childless couple homesteading at the edge of the wilderness build a girl out of snow one evening, and the next morning a girl is living in the woods.
A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013.
Five days in Chechnya in 2004, in a village and a ruined hospital, moving back through the decade of the two wars to show how the people in it are connected.
His first novel, written while he was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
An astronaut is left for dead on Mars and has to keep himself alive on a habitat built for thirty-one days, with potatoes, a rover and a great deal of arithmetic.
Weir serialised it on his own website and self-published it before a publisher bought it. The Ridley Scott film followed in 2015.
The life of a chef called Eva Thorvald, told in eight chapters from eight other people’s points of view, each one built around a dish.
His first novel.
Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana, one married to an Englishman at Cape Coast Castle and one sold from the dungeon below it, and then one chapter for each generation of their descendants down to the present.
She was in her twenties when it was published, and it was her first book.
Eight stories that take the shapes of horror, fairy tale and television recap and use them on women’s bodies. One of them retells every episode of Law & Order: SVU.
A National Book Award finalist in 2017, and a collection rather than a novel.
Twelve Native American narrators converging on the Big Oakland Powwow, each with their own reason for being there.
The last Adult Debut winner before the gap. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2019.
A history of Black political movements told through Black-owned bookshops: David Ruggles’s Manhattan storefront in 1834, Lewis Michaux’s National Memorial African Book Store in Harlem, Drum and Spear in Washington under FBI surveillance, Eso Won in Los Angeles, and the roughly one hundred and thirty stores trading today.
Her first book, and the first winner of the category under its new name, Debut Adult.
The same thirty-six books, arranged by award year instead of by category. There is nothing between 2019 and 2026.
2009
Fiction · The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
Nonfiction · The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
Debut · The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
2010
Fiction · Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese
Nonfiction · The Lost City of Z, David Grann
Debut · The Help, Kathryn Stockett
2011
Fiction · Room, Emma Donoghue
Nonfiction · Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand
Debut · Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes
2012
Fiction · The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
Nonfiction · Blood, Bones & Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton
Debut · The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht
2013
Fiction · The Round House, Louise Erdrich
Nonfiction · Wild, Cheryl Strayed
Debut · The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
2014
Fiction · Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
Nonfiction · The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown
Debut · A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra
2015
Fiction · All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Nonfiction · Being Mortal, Atul Gawande
Debut · The Martian, Andy Weir
2016
Fiction · Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff
Nonfiction · Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Debut · Kitchens of the Great Midwest, J. Ryan Stradal
2017
Fiction · The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Nonfiction · The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben
Debut · Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
2018
Fiction · Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
Nonfiction · Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann
Debut · Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
2019
Fiction · Circe, Madeline Miller
Nonfiction · Educated, Tara Westover
Debut · There There, Tommy Orange
2026
Fiction · The Correspondent, Virginia Evans
Nonfiction · One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad
Debut · Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore, Char Adams
This is the part that most pages about this prize get wrong, so it is worth setting out plainly.
The awards were presented every year at BookExpo America, the trade fair where American publishing met its booksellers. BookExpo was cancelled permanently in 2020, and the awards stopped with it. There were no Indies Choice Book Awards for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 or 2025.
In January 2026 the American Booksellers Association brought them back, with seven categories, no jury round, and — for the first time in the award’s history — money attached. Booksellers from more than three thousand shops voted. The winners were announced on 8 April 2026.
The reason the internet still says the prize is dead is that the association’s own archive page is headed “2009–2019” and ranks well. It is an archive of the first run, not an obituary.
Two things with similar names, and they are not competing — one feeds the other.
The Indie Next List is a monthly list of books that independent booksellers want to recommend. Hundreds of titles appear on it each year. It is a recommendation, not a prize.
The Indies Choice Book Awards are the annual vote on which of those books the booksellers liked best. A book cannot win one without having been an Indie Next or Indies Introduce pick first. So the list is the pipeline, and the award is what comes out of it.
A third thing, worth keeping separate: the Indie Book Awards, run by other organisations for self-published and small-press titles, have nothing to do with either of these.
They are the annual awards of the American Booksellers Association, voted for by booksellers at independent bookshops across the United States. The awards began in 2009, replacing the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, and only books that booksellers had already championed on the Indie Next List, the Kids’ Indie Next List or Indies Introduce are eligible. There are three adult categories: fiction, nonfiction and debut.
No, although almost everything written about them online says so, and the American Booksellers Association’s own archive page is headed “2009–2019”, which is where the belief comes from. The awards stopped after 2019 because BookExpo, where they were presented, was permanently cancelled. The association relaunched them in January 2026 and announced the first new winners on 8 April 2026. A second 2026 cycle is running now, with winners due on 25 November 2026.
In the adult categories: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans took fiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad took nonfiction, and Black-Owned by Char Adams took the debut category, now called Debut Adult. They were announced on 8 April 2026, and each author received $2,000 — the first time the award has ever carried money.
The Indie Next List is a monthly list of books that independent booksellers want to recommend. Hundreds of titles appear on it every year, and it is a recommendation, not a prize. The Indies Choice Book Awards are the annual vote on which of those books the booksellers liked best. A book cannot win an Indies Choice award without having been an Indie Next or Indies Introduce pick first, so the list is the pipeline and the award is the result.
It does now, and it did not before. From 2009 to 2019 the award carried no money at all. The association’s own chief operating officer says the 2026 relaunch is the first time the award has carried money at all. The April 2026 winners received $2,000 each, and the cycle now running pays $1,500. So any page that credits an earlier winner such as Tara Westover or Tommy Orange with Indies Choice prize money has it wrong.
The process changed with the relaunch. Until 2019 there was a round of bookseller voting and then a committee that chose the final titles from what that round produced. Since 2026 there is no committee: booksellers nominate up to three titles per category, the nominations become a shortlist, and the shortlist is voted on. Whichever book gets the most votes wins.
One. Circe by Madeline Miller won adult fiction and the audiobook category in 2019, the audiobook read by Perdita Weeks. It is also the last adult fiction winner before the seven-year gap. The audiobook category itself only existed in 2018 and 2019 and was not revived.
David Grann has won adult nonfiction twice, with The Lost City of Z in 2010 and Killers of the Flower Moon in 2018. He is the only twice-winner in the adult categories. Outside them, Ruta Sepetys won young adult in 2012 and 2017.
Because a second cycle is already running. When the winners were announced on 8 April 2026 the association, Publishers Weekly and Shelf Awareness all called them the 2026 Indies Choice Book Awards. The association’s website has since moved them under a heading that reads “2025 Winners”, apparently by the year the books were published, to free the name 2026 for the cycle that closes on 25 November 2026. No statement explaining the change has been published, so this page uses the name that was used at the announcement.
My literary prizes index has every prize page on this site, with what each one is for and who it has gone to.
The Indies Choice Book Awards are administered by the American Booksellers Association and voted for by booksellers at member shops. The name was adopted in 2009; they succeeded the Book Sense Book of the Year Awards.
Eligible titles are those that appeared on the Indie Next List, the Kids’ Indie Next List or Indies Introduce.
Indies Choice Book Awards — American Booksellers Association
The awards were not discontinued. They were relaunched in January 2026 after a hiatus since 2019.correction
The programme stopped because BookExpo, where the awards were presented, was permanently cancelled in 2020.correction
ABA announces 2026 Indies Choice Book Award winners — Publishers Weekly
From 2009 to 2019 the award carried no prize money. The association’s chief operating officer, Joy Dallanegra-Sanger, puts it plainly: this is the first time there is a monetary award.correction
Why should I vote in the Indies Choice Book Awards? — American Booksellers Association
Until 2019 booksellers voted first and a committee then chose the final titles from what came out. Since 2026 there is no committee round at all: the book with the most votes wins.correction
Why should I vote in the Indies Choice Book Awards? — American Booksellers Association
The awards were presented at BookExpo: for most years at the association’s Celebration of Bookselling, and in 2019 in a new format on the trade show floor.
The winners were announced on 8 April 2026. The association called them the 2026 Indies Choice Book Awards, as did Publishers Weekly and Shelf Awareness.
Each winning author received $2,000. The cycle now running pays $1,500 and closes on 25 November 2026, with two new categories for independent presses.
Indies Choice Book Awards — American Booksellers Association
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Crown, 29 April 2025.
It is a debut novel, and it also won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel in March 2026 — so it took the adult fiction category while being eligible for the debut one.
Announcing the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel — PEN/Faulkner
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, Knopf, 25 February 2025. It is his first work of nonfiction, after two novels, and it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2025.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This — National Book Foundation
The Correspondent also won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, announced on 11 June 2026.
Black-Owned by Char Adams, Tiny Reparations Books, 4 November 2025. It is her first book.
Indies Introduce Q&A with Char Adams — American Booksellers Association
The category is called Debut Adult in the association’s own release; before the gap it was Adult Debut.
Every adult winner from 2009 to 2019 on this page is transcribed from the association’s own archive of the awards.
In 2009 the three adult categories had different names: Best Indie Buzz Book (fiction), Best Conversation Starter (nonfiction) and Best Author Discovery (debut). They were renamed in 2010.correction
Circe is the only book to have won two categories in one year: adult fiction and audiobook, in 2019.
David Grann is the only twice-winner in the adult categories: nonfiction in 2010 and 2018.
The audiobook category existed only in 2018 and 2019 and was not revived in 2026.
The E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards were run by the Association of Booksellers for Children and were announced alongside the Indies Choice awards from 2010; the programme was formally called the Indies Choice Book Awards / E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards. They were not part of the 2026 relaunch, which has its own children’s categories.
Last verified 23 September 2026. The winner lists come from the American Booksellers Association’s own records. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates — whether this award still exists, whether it has ever carried prize money, how the winners are chosen — the source wins and the correction is on the page, marked above. The children’s and young adult categories are not on this page because I have not checked them.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Thirty-six books chosen by the people who sell books for a living. If that is the kind of recommendation you trust, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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