Oregon Book Award

The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually by Literary Arts, Inc. for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in the genres of Fiction, Poetry, Literary Nonfiction, Drama, and Young Readers' Literature. Listed here are the winners in both Fiction and Nonfiction categories.

2023 Winners:

Fiction Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo This stunning debut from O. Henry Prize winner Sindya Bhanoo offers intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind, centering women's lives and asking how women claim and surrender power.	General Nonfiction Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home by Lauren Kessler 95 percent of the millions of American men and women who go to prison eventually get out. What happens to them?
Creative Nonfiction Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery by Casey Parks Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: as Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life.	Poetry Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke by Eric Tran While the poems in Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke portray a yearning for intimacy, they create spaces to experience the duality of pleasure and mourning. Even when Tran writes under formal constraint, like the crown of sonnets, these poems struggle and break and, in doing so, explore queer and transformative ways of wanting and being wanted.
Children's Literature Friends Are Friends, Forever by Dane Liu and Lynn Scurfield A moving picture book about Chinese paper cutting and sharing the magic of friendship across continents.	Young Adult Literature Dream, Annie, Dream by Waka T. Brown In this empowering deconstruction of the so-called American Dream, a twelve-year-old Japanese American girl grapples with, and ultimately rises above, the racism and trials of middle school she experiences while chasing her dreams.
Graphic Literature Trespassers by Breena Bard Gabby Woods is looking forward to another summer vacation at her family's lake house, even though she would rather bury herself in a mystery novel than make new friends. But soon Gabby meets Paige, a snarky kid from Chicago, and they get caught up in a local mystery: the sudden disappearance of a glamorous couple and the extravagant lake house they left behind.