The Boston Authors Club has been awarding the Julia Ward Howe Prizes, (named after the Club's first President) to outstanding adult and young reader books for over twenty years.  These awards recognize exceptional books by Boston area authors in four separate categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and the Young Reader category.

Scroll down to see the details about which books won which categories in which year!

The BAC’s JWH Award Winners

2019 Awards

Fiction

Winner: The World that We Knew by Alice Hoffman (Simon and Schuster)

Finalists

Bunny by Mona Awad (Penguin/Viking)

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer (Back Bay/Little Brown)

Non-Fiction

Winner: Floating Coast by Bathsheba Demuth (WW Norton)

Finalists

The Club by Leo Damrosch (Yale)

Seeing Trees by Sonja Dumpelmann (Yale)

American Radicals by Holly Jackson (Crown/Penguin)

Honorable Mention

The Known, the Secret, the Forgotten by Joan Wheelis  (WW Norton)

Poetry

Winner: Tap Out by Edgar Kunz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Finalist

Even the Dark by Leslie Williams (Southern IL University Press)

2020 Awards

Fiction

Winner: Monogamy by Sue Miller (Harper)

Finalists:

Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman (Simon & Schuster)

The Bear by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press)

Non-Fiction

Winner: Rule of Five by Richard Lazurus (Harvard University Press)

Finalists:

Last Kings of Shanghai by Jonathan Kaufman (Penguin)

Tacky’s Revolt by Vincent Brown (Harvard University Press)

Poetry

Winner: Owed by Joshua Bennett (Penguin)