Purpose / Mission Statement

"The purpose of the award is to recognize and honor one book, selected from among all the books published in any one calendar year, which has made an outstanding contribution to the body of printed materials about Idaho. The award is intended to encourage the writing and publishing of books about Idaho, and to encourage excellence in writing and high standards of accuracy and readability in those books."

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Book Award News

25th Anniversary Idaho Book Award winner for 2008

The Idaho Book Award committee selected James Castle: a Retrospective edited by Ann Percy as the 2008 Idaho Book Award Winner.   The retrospective catalog, jointly published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press,  lavishly captures the genres of Castle's work and essays by Percy and others examine that work from a variety of perspectives.  Ann Percy is the Curator of Drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Two honorable mentions were also selected for 2008,  Brandon Schrand's The Enders Hotel: a Memoir and Mark Lisk's Owyhee Canyonlands (with an essay by William Fox).  This year's field of nominees was large and impresive with 22 books being nominated for the award.

This is the 25th anniversary of the Idaho Book Award.  The first recipient of the award in 1984 was Mining Town: the Photographic Record of T.N. Barnard and Nellie Stockbridge from the Coeur d'Alenes, Patricia Hart and Ivar Nelson (University of Washington Press ; Idaho State Historical Society)