PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Nine esteemed Oregon authors won big at the 2023 Oregon Book Awards ceremony held at Portland Center Stage on Monday night.
The Oregon Book Awards have been organized by Literary Arts, a Portland-based nonprofit that aims “to engage readers, support writers, & inspire the next generation with great literature,” since 1987.
Susan Moore serves as the nonprofit’s Director of Programs for Writers, and has seen firsthand how the awards ceremony has grown since her first year in 2006.
“I think the caliber of our writers and the breadth and the width of the writers has really changed over the years,” Moore said.
This year’s winners include former The New York Times reporter Sindya Bhanoo for Seeking Fortune Elswhere: Stores, Portland poet Eric Tran for Mouth, Sugar, and Smoke, and Eugene nonfiction writer Lauren Kessler for Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home.
Read about the rest of the winners here.
According to Moore, the 2022 ceremony was the first in-person event in a couple of years due to COVID-19. And on Monday night, audiences got the opportunity to attend the in-person ceremony once again.
Moore says some highlights of the event were having previous winners present their categories to this year’s award winners, and having Portland Center Stage actors perform an excerpt from the play that won the Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama, The Storyteller by Sara Jean Accuardi.
KOIN 6 previously reported that Literary Arts looks for a diverse array of judges for the Oregon Book Awards, in terms of factors like race, geographic location and the type of writing that they do. Moore says that this practice has shown in the wide range of authors that are recognized each year.
Literary Arts also organizes the annual Portland Book Festival, an event that celebrates authors and provides the local literary community with pop-up readings, book markets, author talks and more.
“Festivals are great because they bring lots of people together around literature,” Moore said. “I think the thing that awards do is [they] shine a spotlight on writing that might have been overlooked. It helps promote great writing and it helps people widen their audience, and that has an impact on the kind of opportunities you get as an author.”
The nonprofit will start accepting submissions for the 2024 Oregon Book Awards this June.