Girl Stuff by Kaz Cooke (Viking) was named the winner of the Nielsen BookData 2008 Booksellers Choice Award at the 84th Annual Booksellers Dinner on Monday night.

After a moment of confusion, in which the slide for Janette Turner Hospital's shortlisted novel Orpheus Lost was projected onto the screen and mistaken as the winner by the audience, Cooke took to the stage, good humouredly asking the organisers ‘Are you sure?'

The author paid tribute to the team at Penguin, saying she ‘could not ask for a more professional bunch of people', and thanking them for allowing her to ‘do it properly'--referring to the in-depth research undertaken for her book, which involved the Penguin IT department collating 4000 responses to 16 questions.

Cooke amused the audience with tales of her own bookselling days, and said she was ‘so excited this is a booksellers award.' ‘I just think it's the most glamorous thing in the world,' she said of the profession.

Girl Stuff: Your Full-on Guide to the Teen Years, beat shortlisted titles Orpheus Lost (Janette Turner Hospital); The Memory Room (Chrisopher Koch, Knopf); 4 Ingredients (Kim McCosker & Rachel Berminham, 4 Ingredients) and stable mate titles The Peasant Prince (Li Cunxin, illus by Anne Spudvilas, Viking) and Maggie's Harvest (Maggie Beer, Lantern).

http://www.booksellerandpublisher.com.au/articles/2008/06/08549/

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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