Indiana Authors Awards


The Indiana Authors Awards, also known as the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards, is a literary awards program that recognizes and honors authors from Indiana and literary works about Indiana. In 2020, awards were given in eight categories, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, children's literature, young adult literature, drama, genre and emerging. The awards program runs biennially, with books published in 2020 and 2021 honored in 2022. Winners receive a cash prize, an Indiana limestone award trophy, and the opportunity to select an Indiana library to receive a donation. The 2024 winners include the following categories: nonfiction, fiction, debut, genre, poetry, young adult, middle grade, children's, and drama.

History

The awards program was founded in 2009 by philanthropists Eugene and Marilyn Glick, partnering with The Indianapolis Public Library Foundation to create a program which recognized authors annually. Honors were awarded to authors in the three main categories of national, regional, and emerging, with some years including recognition for lifetime achievement and general excellence.
In 2018, Glick Philanthropies announced a desire to expand the awards program. After a year hiatus, in 2019 Glick Philanthropies partnered with Indiana Humanities to offer an expanded program, awarding honors to books every other year and a new Literary Champion Award. The 2020 awards included books in eight categories and recognized the Indiana Writers Center as Literary Champion. In the spring of 2022, the Indiana Authors Awards Tour brought recent award-winning authors to Indiana communities. The most recent awards cycle occurred in August 2024.

Winners of awards for lifetime bodies of work

Following is a subset of the awards granted, focusing just on top honors that are for authors' complete lifetime works. These primarily are just the National Winners, the Regional Winners, and the Lifetime Achievement Awards which were all granted on basis of persons' entire body of works. It omits two National Finalist and four Regional Finalist awards given in 2009–10, the first years of the program, and not offered in any later year. It includes two "Excellence" awards given, and it omits "Emerging Winner" and "Emerging Finalist" awards. In 2019, no awards were granted, and the focus of the program shifted to make awards for recent books in various categories. No awards were given in 2021. In 2020 and 2022, there appears to be only one "Lifetime Achievement" award granted, included below.
The remaining awards through 2024 make up a set of authors comparable to other writers' halls of fame. These awards, for entire bodies of authors' complete work, are:
YearAwardAuthor
2009National WinnerJames Alexander Thom
2009Regional WinnerSusan Neville
2010National WinnerScott Russell Sanders
2010Regional WinnerRay Boomhower
2011National WinnerMargaret McMullan
2011Regional WinnerHelen Frost
2012Lifetime AchievementDan Wakefield
2012National WinnerJohn Green
2012Regional WinnerBarbara Shoup
2013National WinnerMichael Martone
2013Regional WinnerJames H. Madison
2014National WinnerMichael Shelden
2014Regional WinnerNorbert Krapf
2015Lifetime AchievementMari Evans
2015National WinnerMarianne Boruch
2015Regional WinnerAdrian Matejka
2016National WinnerKaren Joy Fowler
2016Regional WinnerPhilip Gulley
2016Genre Excellence Winner
April Pulley Sayre
2017National WinnerKekla Magoon
2017Regional WinnerLori Rader-Day
2017Genre Excellence Winner
John David Anderson
2018National WinnerKimberly Brubaker Bradley
2018Regional WinnerSandy Eisenberg Sasso
2018Lifetime AchievementJames Alexander Thom
2020Literary ChampionIndiana Writers Center
2022Literary ChampionJL Kato
2022Lifetime AchievementJames H. Madison
2024Literary ChampionTony Brewer
2024Lifetime AchievementSusan Neville

Category Winners