Nielsen BookData in partnership with BolognaBookPlus
Great and eventful evening at the Ham Yard Hotel in Piccadilly!
Nielsen BookData partnered with BolognaBookPlus to make this happen and give authors and publishers the opportunity to celebrate the success of some of the books people loved (to buy) throughout the year.
Richard Osman won a platinum award, selling more than a million copies of The Man Who Died Twice and The Thursday Murder Club. Freida McFadden won silver for The Housemaid’s Secret and The Housemaid Is Watching that sold more than 250,000 copies; and the gold award for the more than 500,000 copies sold of The Housemaid.
David Nicholls won the gold award for the acclaimed novel One Day, which is lovely to see as it demonstrates the long-lasting love the public can have towards a book. Seems we are still not ready to let it go! The next One Day has definitely been Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton that in fact won the gold award as well.
Amongst our guests were also some of last year's students of the MA in Publishing at University College London and Oxford Brookes. Wishing to acknowledge the kind of research and work that goes on within these institutions, two of them were awarded the Dissertation Showcase prize of 2025. Arianna Ferioli from UCL, wrote an incredibly relevant thesis on Curating Crisis: Mediating Palestinian Narratives through #Bookstagram Recommendations. “My aim was to show how persistent the fight for Palestinian narratives has been in the publishing industry” she says to me as we meet moments after the collection of her award. Richard Woolley from Oxford Brookes, now editor at Palgrave Macmillan, was equally enthused to win the award for his work on Sensitivity Readers in Trade Publishing (click on this link to have a look: https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/home.do).
The Special Mentions of the evening should definitely also be mentioned on here: from Oxford Brookes Helen Zeineh The Role of Publishers in the 1950s Obscenity Trials and Beth Pouncett Marginalized Identity in Pulp Literature. From UCL: Nico Callaghan Out of One Dream Another Is Born: The Literary Publishing Field in Beirut and Teodora Vassileva Bulgarian Literature on UK Shelves. I believe these titles speak greatly of the quality and nuance these students have brought about thanks to their research.
Overall, it was a great night in the cold city of London. Chatting and celebrating books makes us proud but most importantly, excited for what will come next.
Congratulations to all the winners and to the authors and publishers that persevere to get beautiful, inspiring books on our shelves every year.
