Lists

2020 Goodreads Choice Awards Winners Announced

Megan Mabee Dec 8, 2020

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Megan Mabee

Contributor

Megan Mabee has been filling notebooks with her story ideas and favorite book quotes since she first began reading. She enjoys board gaming, rewatching Miyazaki movies, and building Legos with her preschooler. Megan holds a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from UNC Greensboro and a Public Librarian Certification. Megan has worked in a college bookstore and high school library, and she now loves talking books in the public library where she works and as a Bibliologist at TBR: Tailored Book Recommendations.

View All posts by Megan Mabee

Today, after tallying 5,674,480 votes, Goodreads announced the 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards winners. Every year, Goodreads nominates 15 books in each of 20 genre categories and asks Goodreads members to vote for their favorites. Goodreads selects the nominees by analyzing statistics from millions of book ratings added throughout the year on their site, as well as any write-in nominations. To learn more about how the Goodreads Choice Awards selection process works, check out this Rioter’s review of the process.

A promising trend surfaced amongst this year’s winners. The 2020 Goodreads Choice Award winners feature eight authors of color, making up 40% of the winning authors. This provides a sharp contrast to the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award winners, in which only one author of color’s book won (Ali Wong’s Dear Girls in the Humor category). Let’s hope this trend continues.

While reviewing the winners in each category, a few more notable voting patterns emerged. For example, in the historical fiction category, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half won by more than triple the votes of any other nominee in that category! Bennett’s book received 102,626 votes compared to the runner-up’s 34,021 votes.

The race for Goodread’s favorite fiction pick, on the other hand, came close this year—as in, five votes close. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library won by 72,828 votes while Frederik Backman’s Anxious People came in second at 72,823 votes.

To view the 2020 Goodreads Choice Awards winners in each genre category, check out the list below. Don’t forget to browse the nominees too!