Carrie Brown, Author of Rose's Garden, Wins 1998 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--February 22, 1999---Barnes & Noble today announced that Carrie Brown has been named the winner of the 1998 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for her debut novel, Rose's Garden, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. This literary award honors the first novel by an American author featured in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program during the 1998 calendar year. The Discover Award carries a cash prize of $10,000 with the winner receiving a trip to New York City for a host of award-related festivities.

In 1998, the Discover Great New Writers program featured the work of 79 new writers, with 38 of those authors qualifying for the Discover Award. This year, for the first time, the judges elected to name a shortlist for the award. Chosen from among the thirty-eight eligible books, the shortlist consisted of three authors who the judges felt deserved special recognition and it was from this list that the final winner was selected. In addition to Carrie Brown, the shortlist included Joe Connelly, author of Bringing Out the Dead (Knopf), and Tom McNeal, author of Goodnight Nebraska (Random House). 1998 marks the sixth anniversary of the Award and Ms. Brown, joins the ranks of an exceptional group of past winners, including David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars, Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Giant's House, and J. Robert Lennon, author of The Light of Falling Stars.

Rose's Garden was selected by a jury panel made up of three distinguished authors, all of whom were featured in the Discover program in the early stages of their career. The panel for the 1998 awards consists of the winner of the very first Discover award, Sandra Benitez, author of A Place Where the Sea Remembers and Bitter Grounds; Katharine Weber, teacher of creative writing at Yale University and the author of the New York Times Notable book Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear and The Music Lesson; and Oscar Hijuelos, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love and Empress of the Splendid Season, among many other fine works.

Carrie Brown grew up in Connecticut and Vermont. She lived abroad with her family, first in England, where her father was transferred for business, and then in Hong Kong. She graduated from Brown University, and earned an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she held a Henry Hoyns Fellowship. A journalist for many years, she now teaches at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Ms. Brown has been awarded the Commonwealth of Virginia's Commission for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction. Her second novel, Lamb in Love, will be published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in April. Ms. Brown is married to the novelist John Gregory Brown. They have three children.

Comments from the judges on Rose's Garden:

"Carrie Brown's Rose's Garden is a marvelous first novel, lush in character and place. Brown's imaginative and lyrical prose is steeped in wisdom. Her storytelling is skillful and seamless. Her images both luminous and fresh. This novel is so well-written that it defies belief that it is her first book. What a career Carrie Brown has before her! How blessed we will be with whatever she writes next." -Sandra Benitez

"Many first novels have moments of wisdom and flashes of brilliance. Some have bursts of dazzling language and passages of intense, lyrical, moving evocations of time and place and sensibility. A few have extraordinary characters and situations that ring true and feel just right. These elements, as we encounter them on the page, remind us why the writer has made it into print....Rose's Garden is extraordinary in its deft and beautifully crafted language, its graceful narrative pace, its intelligence, and its originality. It is that rare thing: a first novel that doesn't just introduce us to a promising new talent, it satisfies us as readers, and by the final page we have truly discovered a great new writer, Carrie Brown." -Katharine Weber

"Rose's Garden is a moving and lyrical novel; I much liked its elegiac tone, its reverence for nature and the way that Carrie Brown writes about death and love and memory, to great and memorable effect. All in all, this is an elegant debut for a talented and thoughtful first-time novelist." -Oscar Hijuelos

The 1998 Discover Great New Writers Award will be presented on March 9th in a special ceremony at Barnes & Noble Union Square at 7:30p.m.

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