Reading List · Books of the year
The British Book Awards, known as the Nibbies after their nib-shaped trophy, are the UK book trade’s annual awards, run since 2017 by the trade magazine The Bookseller. They were founded by Fred Newman of Publishing News, with a first ceremony in January 1990, and the overall Book of the Year category launched in 1994. Between 2010 and 2014 they ran as the Galaxy and then Specsavers National Book Awards, and no awards were held in 2015 or 2016.
By Lisanne Swart · 31 winners since 1994 · Fiction and non-fiction · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
Click a title to read about it further down ↓
Quick answer
The British Book Awards, or Nibbies, are the UK book trade’s annual awards, run by The Bookseller, with an overall Book of the Year chosen since 1994. The 2026 Book of the Year is Nobody’s Girl, the posthumous memoir of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, co-written with Amy Wallace.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every winner for Book of the Year, all 33 of them. The latest fifteen have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
The shop links on this page go straight to the shop. They are not affiliate links and I earn nothing if you buy.
Emma and Dexter, two University of Edinburgh graduates, spend the night together on St Swithin’s Day, 15 July 1988, and part; the novel returns to them on that date each year for the next twenty years.
Voted Galaxy Book of the Year by the reading public; filmed in 2011 with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, and adapted as a Netflix series in 2024.
Caitlin Moran’s memoir of her life from her teens to her mid-thirties, setting out her views on feminism and using her own struggles and self-deprecating humour to make the subject approachable.
Also won Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2011 Galaxy National Book Awards; it had sold over a million copies by 2014.
College graduate Anastasia Steele meets the young Seattle businessman Christian Grey, and their deepening relationship involves BDSM themes, in a novel first published in 2011.
The story began as Twilight fan fiction; a film adaptation was released in February 2015.
A man returns to his childhood home town for a funeral and recalls events of forty years earlier, when his neighbour Lettie Hempstock insisted the pond behind her house was an ocean.
Chosen by public vote after winning the Audiobook of the Year category; adapted for the National Theatre in 2019.
Eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman marries the wealthy Amsterdam merchant Johannes Brandt, joins his household and begins receiving unsettling gifts from an unseen miniaturist.
Jessie Burton’s debut novel, inspired by Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house in the Rijksmuseum; adapted by BBC One in 2017.
In 1893 the newly widowed Cora Seaborne leaves London for the Essex village of Aldwinter, where, as an amateur palaeontologist, she becomes fascinated by rumours of a sea serpent known as the Blackwater Beast.
Also Waterstones Book of the Year 2016; adapted as a television series for Apple with Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston.
Eleanor, a 29-year-old finance clerk living a solitary life in Glasgow, is drawn towards friendship through an infatuation with a local singer and a collapsed stranger she helps to save.
Won the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award; Reese Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine optioned the film rights.
Connell and Marianne, from different social classes, meet at secondary school in County Sligo and later study at Trinity College Dublin, in a novel spanning 2011 to 2015 that examines how class keeps people apart.
Won Best Novel at the 2018 Costa Book Awards; adapted for BBC Three and Hulu in 2020.
Queenie Jenkins, a 25-year-old British-Jamaican woman, works through a year in which much of her life goes wrong, in Candice Carty-Williams’s debut novel, published by Trapeze in 2019.
Carty-Williams became the first Black author to win Book of the Year; Channel 4 adapted the novel in 2024.
Shuggie, the youngest of three children, grows up in working-class Glasgow with his mother Agnes, who struggles with alcoholism, in a story that moves between 1981 and 1992.
Douglas Stuart’s first novel; it won the 2020 Booker Prize.
A guide for readers aged 10 to 14 that mixes stories from Marcus Rashford’s childhood with advice from performance psychologist Katie Warriner on ambition, practice, setbacks, teamwork and speaking up for others.
Published by Macmillan Children’s Books in 2021 and named by The Times among the best children’s books for summer 2021.
A book about the menopause by the broadcaster Davina McCall and Dr Naomi Potter, published in 2022 after McCall’s Channel 4 documentaries on the subject.
Followed McCall’s 2021 documentary Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause, which coverage credits with raising awareness of menopause treatment.
A collection of murder mystery puzzles modelled on logic grids, developed from the daily web game that the American writer and programmer G. T. Karber created in 2022.
The UK’s bestselling book at Christmas 2023, making Karber only the third non-British author to achieve that.
The Russian opposition leader’s account of his life and political career, followed by a prison diary, begun in Germany after his Novichok poisoning in 2020 and ending weeks before his death in February 2024.
Published posthumously in October 2024, translated by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel; Russia’s justice ministry declared it ‘extremist material’ in 2025.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre describes being groomed and abused by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and her later fight for justice, in a memoir completed with Amy Wallace and published after her death in April 2025.
Also won Non-Fiction: Narrative Book of the Year and shared the 2026 Freedom to Publish award.
The awards were founded by Fred Newman, owner of the trade paper Publishing News, and the first ceremony was held on 18 January 1990 at the Park Lane Hotel in London. The overall Book of the Year category was added in 1994, when Jung Chang’s Wild Swans won. The awards ran as the British Book Awards until 2009, with sponsors’ names attached in some years, such as the Galaxy British Book Awards.
Agile Marketing then acquired the awards and renamed them the National Book Awards, sponsored by Galaxy in 2010–2011 and by Specsavers in 2012–2014; in several of these years the overall winner was chosen by public vote from the category winners. After two years without awards, The Bookseller bought them from Newman’s estate and restored the British Book Awards name in 2017.
Alongside the overall Book of the Year, the 2026 categories included Fiction, Debut Fiction, Crime & Thriller, Non-Fiction: Narrative, Non-Fiction: Lifestyle & Illustrated, Children’s Fiction and Children’s Non-Fiction & Illustrated, as well as Discover, Graphic Novel and two audiobook prizes. Science Fiction & Fantasy and Romantic Fiction were added for 2026, replacing the Page-turner category.
The awards also name an Author of the Year and an Illustrator of the Year. In 2026 the Fiction prize went to Philippa Gregory’s Boleyn Traitor, Debut Fiction to Florence Knapp’s The Names, Children’s Fiction to Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping, and Author of the Year to A. F. Steadman; Percival Everett was Author of the Year in 2025.
The UK book trade’s annual awards, nicknamed the Nibbies and run since 2017 by The Bookseller. They began in 1990 and have chosen an overall Book of the Year since 1994.
Nobody’s Girl, the memoir of Virginia Roberts Giuffre written with Amy Wallace, which also won Non-Fiction: Narrative Book of the Year.
Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir Patriot was the 2025 Book of the Year, and Percival Everett was Author of the Year.
The nickname comes from the nib-shaped trophy given to winners.
Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, in 1994, the year the category launched.
Yes. From 2010 to 2014 the awards ran as the National Book Awards, sponsored by Galaxy (2010–2011) and Specsavers (2012–2014), before The Bookseller restored the British Book Awards name in 2017.
No awards were held in those two years; they resumed in 2017 after The Bookseller acquired them.
Candice Carty-Williams, for Queenie in 2020, the same year Bernardine Evaristo was Author of the Year.
Winner list last verified 28 October 2026.
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.
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