Barnes & Noble has chosen Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee (Summit Books/S&S) as its $10,000 Discover Prize Winner, honoring the "best new author published this year." The title was voted on by B&N booksellers from the company's monthly Discover picks.
"Finding talented new authors and elevating their work--introducing them to so many readers who might otherwise miss them--is one of the most gratifying parts of being a bookseller," said Shannon DeVito, B&N's director of books. "This year's shortlist sparked vigorous debates with readers each championing their favorite. Ultimately a clear victor emerged, and we are delighted to call Katie Yee the winner of our 2025 Discover Prize."
Fiction campaign manager Lexie Smith commented: "This is one of the most surprising debuts I read this year. Yee takes what could be tragic: a marriage ending, a cancer diagnosis, and turns it into something warm, funny, and deeply life-affirming. This is the book I keep pressing into people's hands when they ask me what to read next."
The five runners-up were:
Kaplan's Plot by Jason Diamond
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin
Tilt by Emma Pattee
The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Steeds
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambagu
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Sarah Hagger-Holt won the 2025 Little Rebels Award for The Fights That Make Us. In addition to a £2,000 (about $2,675) prize, funded by the Barry Amiel and Normal Melburn Trust, the winner received a limited edition print by Ken Wilson Max. Hagger-Holt is the award's first double winner, having been honored in 2022 for Proud of Me.
Phoebe Demeger, librarian at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and a prize judge, praised The Fights That Make Us for drawing "an artful equivalence between Section 28 and contemporary discrimination" and as "an urgent book." Author, teacher, and award judge Alom Shaha, added: "This is the kind of book I'd put into the hands of young readers. I want to see this in schools."
The organizers of the Little Rebels Award called The Fights That Make Us "a beacon of resistance in this current climate."