Steve Brawnius

And I remember you remarked to me during last year after the award that it was a novelty and a nice thing to be regarded as a best-selling author.

And that was thanks to, you know, the Occam Award.

So that changes it.

That's a big game-changer.

It's the one night, you know, you can get together with publishers, other authors, everyone in the trade, booksellers, designers and so forth, and go, well, you know, didn't we do well?

There's some really great stuff here.

And there is, year after year, and 2026 is no exception.

In some ways, some of the choices are, well, they're not perverse or anything.

or not even willful.

But there are some surprising things there.

At the same time, you would absolutely expect, say, in the fiction category, for The Book of Guilt by Catherine Trudgy to be in there.

She has, I believe, has won it

It's third or fourth.

She has won the Occam twice, and she may have won the Fiction Award when it had a previous sponsor.

But, you know, you don't get bigger in the fiction game than Catherine Chidji.

It was the biggest selling novel of the year.

It's this hugely accomplished, technically brilliant novel.

novel with a real story.

You know, we live in a sort of an age of, we want a narrative, we want a yarn, and she provides.

It's a sort of an ingenious story about genetically engineered or chemically engineered children, and they're kind of mutants, and they learn the truth about their existence in this very far-fetched and yet extremely credible and believable