Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Edgar Awards Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool. 

Well it is a busy week of awards long lists. I am going to be posting them all week here on RA for All. This also means it is time for me to do my HUGE annual update of my genre program. This is also why I don't give that talk in the first 2 months of the year-- I need time to update it.

More about that soon as I will post the update when it is ready with commentary. 

This week we have Mystery, Literary, Audiobooks, and all the Library Books and Media award winners. 

I am going to start with the Edgars, one of my favorite awards. 

Here is the link to the Edgar Awards database (so easy to use) and the specific PDF with all of the information about the 2025 nominees. 

The Edgar awards are an EXCELLENT resource, for all of the reasons I normally discuss [see link in the intro], but also because 3 of their awards are straight up readalike awards-- The Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Lillian Jackson Braun Award, and the Sue Grafton Memorial Award. I rely on these awards to help fans of these authors find new titles and authors.

The Edgar Awards also have a WONDERFUL database of past winners and nominees. You can easily search back 79 years [!] and because mysteries are so popular in our libraries, there are endless display and suggestion possibilities held in that database. You can search by category, author, year, basically anyway you might want to look for titles, they have you covered.

Explore the database for yourself.

The range of titles as usual is large and the options are all great suggestions for a wide range of readers. Take just the "Best Novel" category as our example:

BEST NOVEL

• The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Penguin Random House – Random House Worlds/Del Rey
• Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco (Farrar, Straus and Giroux – MCD)
• Things Don’t Break on Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins (Penguin Random House – Crown)
• My Favorite Scar by Nicolás Ferraro (Soho Press – Soho Crime)
• The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Penguin Random House – Riverhead Books)
• Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera (Macmillan Publishers – Celadon Books)
• The In Crowd by Charlotte Vassell (Penguin Random House – Doubleday)

You want a snapshot of the "mystery" landscape, one of our most popular areas for library checkouts, look no further than the Edgar Awards nominees this year, well any year really, and especially over the last 5 years. You can track trends, rising star authors, and key readalike titles with just a click or two. 

And you want diverse displays that cover a wide swath of mystery readers? The last few years of Edgar nominees will make you a great display or online list. 

Click here or on the image above to access the full color, PDF press release for this year's nominees.