Galaxy Greats

The shortlists of nominees for the 2010 Galaxy National Book Awards were just announced in Britain. During previous years, there has been a separate Crime and Thrillers category, but this time around those works have been spread across four other groupings of nominees. Here are the pertinent lists, with crime-fiction works identified in red:

Sainsbury’s Popular Fiction Book of the Year:
• Dead Like You, by Peter James (Macmillan)
• The Ice Cream Girls, by Dorothy Koomson (Sphere)
• Jump! by Jilly Cooper (Bantam Press)
• One Day, by David Nicholls (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Red Queen, by Philippa Gregory (Simon & Schuster)
• Worth Dying For, by Lee Child (Bantam Press)

National Book Tokens New Writer of the Year:
• Patrick Barkham, The Butterfly Isles (Granta Books)
• Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus)
• Katherine Webb, The Legacy (Orion)
• Rebecca Hunt, Mr. Chartwell (Fig Tree)
• Natasha Solomons, Mr. Rosenblum’s List (Sceptre)
• Simon Lelic, Rupture (Picador)

International Author of the Year:
• Colm Toibin, Brooklyn (Penguin)
• Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Fourth Estate)
• Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Quercus/MacLehose Press)
• Kathryn Stockett, The Help (Fig Tree)
• Emma Donoghue, Room (Picador)
• Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Tuskar Rock Press)

Waterstone’s UK Author of the Year:
• Tom McCarthy, C (Jonathan Cape)
• Maggie O’Farrell, The Hand That First Held Mine (Headline Review)
• Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (Doubleday)
• David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Sceptre)
• Rose Tremain, Trespass (Chatto & Windus)
• Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate)

There are also categories for non-fiction, biographies, food and drink, and children’s books. The Galaxy National Book Awards were formerly known as the Galaxy British Book Awards (the “Nibbies”).

Winners will be announced during a November 10 ceremony, to be produced by Cactus TV (and shown in the UK on November 13). The public will subsequently be invited to vote online for the Galaxy Book of the Year, with that final result to be declared on December 13.