Barnes & Noble Announces the Finalists for the Annual Discover Great New Writers Awards; Winners to be Announced March 1st

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largestbookseller, today announced the finalists for its prestigious 2005Discover Great New Writers Awards. The winners in each category,fiction and nonfiction, receive a $10,000 prize and a full year ofadditional promotion from Barnes & Noble. Second-place finalistsreceive $5,000, and third-place finalists, $2,500. The finalists are:
Fiction
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Kitty Fitzgerald, Pigtopia (Miramax Books)
Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins)
Catherine Tudish, Tenney's Landing (Scribner)

Nonfiction
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Louise Brown, The Dancing Girls of Lahore (4th Estate)
Nathaniel Fick, One Bullet Away (Houghton Mifflin)
Martin Moran, The Tricky Part (Beacon Press)

The winners will be announced on Wednesday, March 1st, at aprivate awards ceremony. At 7:00 p.m. that evening, all six finalistsare invited to read from their work at Barnes & Noble's LincolnTriangle store in New York City, located at 1972 Broadway (at 66thStreet). The Discover Awards honor the best works featured in theBarnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program during the previouscalendar year.

The Finalists

Irish poet Kitty Fitzgerald's remarkable novel, Pigtopia, is anambitious and inventive tale of a growing friendship between amisunderstood teenage girl and a social outcast with a porcinepredilection. An unnamed West African country serves as the backdropfor Beasts of No Nation, Uzodinma Iweala's hair-raising novel ofsurvival, narrated by a young boy conscripted into a ragtag guerillaarmy. And Catherine Tudish's Tenney's Landing is a timeless collectionof the subtly intertwined stories of the inhabitants of a Pennsylvaniariver town.

The Dancing Girls of Lahore is British sociologist Louise Brown'shaunting foray into the lives of the women who ply an ancient trade inmodern-day Pakistan, and a fascinating cultural history. From thetraining fields of Quantico, Virginia, to the battlefields ofAfghanistan and Iraq, Nathaniel Fick's One Bullet Away, aninspirational account of his service as an officer in the U.S. MarineCorps, stands out for its honesty, intelligence and introspection.Actor/playwright Martin Moran's exquisitely written memoir, The TrickyPart, startles and provokes with the questions it raises about theconsequences of sexual abuse, and the possibility of forgiveness.

The Jurists

Two panels of distinguished literary jurists selected thefinalists and will select the winners. Serving as this year's fictionjurists are Carrie Brown, whose first novel, Rose's Garden, won theDiscover Award in 1998; Howard Frank Mosher, renown for his novels setin northern Vermont; and Samrat Upadyay, whose just recently publishedshort-story collection, The Royal Ghosts, falls on the heels of hisfirst novel, The Guru of Love.

This year's nonfiction judges include three memoirists: DebraDickerson, the author of An American Story and The End of Blackness;James Frey, the bestselling author of A Million Little Pieces and MyFriend Leonard; and Tom Groneberg, the author of The Secret Life ofCowboys and a forthcoming work, One Good Horse.

The Discover Awards

The Discover Great New Writers program was established in 1990 tohighlight works of exceptional literary quality that might otherwisebe overlooked in a crowded book marketplace. This year's selectionsfeatured the work of 70 new and previously underappreciated writers.Submissions to the program are read and discussed by a volunteer groupof Barnes & Noble booksellers before selection for the program'sseasonal promotions. Past winners of the annual Discover Great NewWriters Award include John Dalton for Heaven Lake (2004), Alison Smithfor Name All the Animals (2004), Monica Ali for Brick Lane (2003),Anthony Doerr for The Shell Collector (2002), Manil Suri for The Deathof Vishnu (2001), Hampton Sides for Ghost Soldiers (2001), TracyChevalier for Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000), Chang-Rae Lee forNative Speaker (1995), and David Guterson for Snow Falling on Cedars(1994).

About Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world's largest booksellerand a Fortune 500 company, operates 824 bookstores in 50 states. Forthe fourth year in a row, the company is the nation's top retail brandfor quality, according to the EquiTrend(R) Brand Study by HarrisInteractive(R). Barnes & Noble conducts its online business throughBarnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com), one of the Web's largest e-commercesites and the number one online bookseller for quality amonge-commerce companies, according to the latest EquiTrend survey.

General information on Barnes & Noble, Inc. can be obtained viathe Internet by visiting the company's corporate Web site:http://www.barnesandnobleinc.com.