Success At Book Industry Awards

MEDIACOM-RELEASE-LONGACRE-PRESS SOUTH ISLAND

Dunedin's publishing and bookselling talents were recognised this week when Longacre Press and University Book Shop Otago won The D W Thorpe Award for New Zealand Publishing and The Independent Bookshop of the Year Award respectively. The strong South Island showing is no small achievement - Booksellers NZ membership shows that 24% of booksellers and only 15% of publishers are South Island- based.

Publishers and Distributors voted for the bookseller awards. Many of their comments were ecstatic. The Independent Bookshop of the Year winner, University Book Shop Otago, was described as "a bookshop with style and character ... fantastic in all areas" and "quite simply the best bookseller in the country"

Voting criteria in The D W Thorpe Award for New Zealand Publishing included high editorial and production standards, and producing books that sell. The winner was Longacre Press, a "small but highly committed" publisher which has achieved outstanding success across a range of books.

In another triumph for the South, Longacre Press title The Art of Grahame Sydney achieved a triple success in the 2000 Montana New Zealand Book Awards winning the Readers' Choice Award, the Illustrative Arts Category and was overall winner of the Montana Medal for non-fiction.

"It is great to see the strong literary and artistic tradition of the South being honoured in this way" said Barbara Larson, managing editor of Longacre Press.

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