Amazon and Penguin Group have just announced the winners of this year’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (ABNA). They are: Gregory Hill of Denver, Colorado, whose East of Denver won in the General Fiction category, and Jill Baguchinsky of Marco Island, Florida, whose Spookygirl won in the Young Adult fiction category.
Both authors will receive publishing contracts from Penguin Group that include $15,000 advances, and their novels will be published by Dutton’s adult and children’s divisions, respectively. The novels are available for pre-order now on Amazon.com at this link.
Hill works at the University of Denver library and plays in “The Babysitters,” a rock and roll power trio that includes his wife on drums. East of Denver tells the story of Shakespeare Williams, who returns to his family’s farm in eastern Colorado to find his widowed, senile father living in squalor. Facing the loss of the farm, Shakespeare hatches a plot with his father and a motley crew of his former high school classmates to rob the local bank. Expert panelist Lev Grossman (who is a book critic for Time Magazine) says that Hill’s writing is “on a par with that of top-flight black-comic novelists like Sam Lipsyte and Jess Walter, and it deserves to be read.”
Baguchinsky, a longtime fan of supernatural tales, wrote the first draft of Spookygirl as part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, a movement that challenges writers to complete a novel in thirty days. In the novel, Violet Addison has moved into an apartment above her father’s funeral home in Florida. Violet regularly converses with the ghosts in the house, but what she is really scared of is starting her sophomore year at a new school. Not only will she battle rumors about her father’s involvement in her mother’s death, but, even more frightening, the evil forces that inhabit the girls’ locker room. Expert panelist Jennifer Besser, Vice President and Publisher of G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, writes that this “funny and suspenseful novel sets itself apart and heralds the arrival of a fresh new voice.”
ABNA is an annual contest co-sponsored by Amazon.com, Penguin Group (USA), and CreateSpace. It is an international competition in search of the next popular novel.