Talking Pictures: Selected Books, a contest celebrating excellence in book design in five categories, is now open for submissions for its 2019 awards. The contest is an offshoot of “Talking Pictures: The Visual Book Now,” a cultural initiative of the New York Rights Fair.
Three books in each of five categories—contemporary art and photography; architecture and graphic design; children’s picture books; comic books and graphic novels; and cookbooks—will be selected as winners, along with special honorees by a panel of jurors drawn from Publishers Weekly, Parsons School of Design, and the Hamelin Cultural Association.
All visual books published in 2018 are eligible. The deadline for submission is February 7, 2019. Winners will be announced later in February. Guidelines and details are available here.
The chosen books will be discussed in depth during a special panel at the New York Rights Fair on May 30, 2019, at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. The books will also be on display at the fair. Following the panel, a reception with the honored authors, illustrators, photographers, designers, and publishers will take place.
Last year's inaugural program honored books published in 2017 and received 511 submissions from 166 publishers from around the world. Members of the jury selected 30 notable books, which hailed from publishers in Japan, Italy, France, Switzerland, the U.K., Portugal, Spain, Canada, and the U.S.
