The Audio Publishers Association held its 16th annual Audies Gala on May 24 at New York's TimesCenter to celebrate the Audies winners of its yearly audiobook awards. The two biggest Audies this year went to musician-memoirist Keith Richards and genre-hopping poet-author Walter Dean Myers.
Audiobook of the Year went to Hachette Audio's Life by Richards, narrated by Johnny Depp and Joe Hurley, with Keith Richards. The APA recognized the audiobook's "multipronged marketing campaign that capitalized on Depp's contributions" and helped introduce a new audience to the format. Life also wins in the Biography/Memoir category.
The Distinguished Achievement in Production award, given to an audiobook "that represents the best the format has to offer in listening excellence," went to Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices by Myers. The audiobook, from Live Oak Media, features a cast of 13, including Ezra Knight, Robin Miles, and Charles Turner, as well as "jazz music and sound effects [that] add to the sense of time and place."
Other winners include Alan Cumming's reading of Zorgamazoo by Robert Paul Weston (Penguin Audio) and Emma Thompson for narrating her own Nanny McPhee Returns (Macmillan Audio); the Fiction award went to Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone, narrated by Emma Galvin (Hachette Audio); Mystery went to Michael Connelly's The Reversal, read by Peter Giles; Nonfiction went to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, narrated by Cassandra Campbell with Bahni Turpin. The full list of winners, along with sound clips, can be found at TheAudies.com. The celebration was hosted by author Adriana Trigiani (Big Stone Gap); presenters included filmmaker/author John Waters and author Thomas Cobb (Crazy Heart).
