Vermont authors Sasha Hom, Carlene Kucharczyk, Mima Tipper and Helen Whybrow have won 2025 Vermont Book Awards. The winners of Vermont’s highest literary prize were announced in a ceremony on Saturday at Greenway Institute in Montpelier. Each wins $1,000 and a trophy created by Vermont artist Bess French. The prize, administered by Vermont Humanities, was given in four categories for work published in 2025. The winners, three of whom were honored for their debut works, were selected from a field of 14 finalists. Vermont poet laureate Bianca Stone delivered the keynote address at the event, where each award was presented by its 2024 winner. Sasha Hom Credit: Courtesy Hom won the fiction prize for her first novella, Sidework, which follows a Korean American mother and adoptee who lives on the West Coast in a van with her four children, two dogs and husband. He homeschools the kids while she waits tables. The author and her husband moved from California to the Northeast Kingdom where she has homeschooled their four children. As Seven Days reviewer K.C. Phipps noted, “Hom’s writing is so intimate, so precise, you’d be forgiven for thinking Sidework is entirely autobiographical.” The book takes place over a single morning shift at the restaurant. “While the plot only covers seven hours,” Phipps wrote, “the story itself encompasses a vast life.” Kucharczyk won the poetry award for Strange Hymn, her debut collection exploring morality and humanity that also won the Juniper Prize for Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Press. Her poems grapple with understanding physical loss and engage with the erosion of memory and time. Carlene Kucharczyk Credit: Courtesy of Meghan Moya Finn “Kucharczyk pushes language to the edge of what it can do, making it leap and wind through the pages, unrestrained. It is playful and full of whimsy while hurling itself toward larger and darker truths,” Chelsea Krieg, administrative director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University, said on the publisher’s website. Added Vievee Francis, winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award for poetry: “Kucharczyk doesn’t shy away from painful insights, she states things straightforwardly, and quietly, which somehow makes the book’s keen observations, both harder to bear and clear.” Writing in an email on Monday, Kucharczyk, of Woodstock, said that she moved to Vermont in 2018 expecting to stay a year. Living among “so many different kinds of writers,” she wrote, “feels endlessly enriching.” Mima Tipper Credit: Courtesy of Karen Pike Photography The children’s literature prize went to Tipper for her debut, Kat’s Greek Summer. The novel follows 14-year-old Kat, whose plans to spend the summer training for her school’s cross-country running team are upended when her Greek mother drags her to Greece to meet family. Tipper, who splits her time between South Hero and Waitsfield, is half Greek herself and based her story loosely on her own childhood summers visiting family in Greece. The result, Kirkus Reviews said, is “a well-balanced drama with plenty of heart.” In an email on Sunday, Tipper said she was “over the moon” simply to be named a finalist. “Since Kat’s Greek Summer came out last May, I’ve met many, many readers and book enthusiasts,” she wrote, adding that she hopes the award will introduce her to many more. Helen Whybrow Credit: Courtesy Whybrow, who has written three works of nonfiction and edited four anthologies, won the creative nonfiction award for The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life, which also made the National Book Award longlist. The memoir recounts her life at Knoll Farm, the 200-acre organic farm in Fayston where she and her husband, Peter Forbes, raise Icelandic sheep. Seven Days reviewer Margot Harrison noted that sheepherding demands continuity and is not inherently dramatic. “Yet,” she wrote, “by pinpointing compelling episodes from her decades of shepherding, Whybrow spins continuity into conflict, controversy, conversation. She reminds us that the best memoirs tell stories while placing them in richly detailed contexts to show us why they matter.” As she accepted the award, Whybrow told the audience that she hopes her memoir “makes people fall more in love with the world and that it’s like a consolation and a remedy in the world.” In her keynote address, Stone recalled the time when there were no books. “When we began to write things down on such lush paper with ink and words, a whole new aspect of our sense of self began,” Stone wrote in the script for her remarks. “Tonight, I want to honor how each genre here came from something so ancient and shared … it all stems from the strange shared cry. A cry that perhaps asked that which is nowhere and everywhere: how should I live my life? And define life? With no answer, we began to write…” Language always falls short, Stone continued, concealing something even as it reveals. Still unsure how to live life, “we must see our responsibility — not to propose to know, but to keep asking the question,” Stone said, “and following where it leads, in its multiplicity, in language, from book to book — let the command to read be sensed in all of us. Not just the words on the page, but what lingers behind them.” The post 2025 Vermont Book Award Winners Announced appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less