An Audie Award (or Audie), bestowed annually in the United States, recognizes outstanding audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. The Audies have been granted by the Audio Publishers Association, the not-for-profit trade organization of the audiobook industry, since 1996. The nominees are announced each year in February, and the winners are announced at a gala banquet held in May, usually when the BookExpo America fair is happening. The Audies are sometimes promoted as "the Oscars of the audiobook industry" and serve as a way to promote audiobooks.
Awards are given in about thirty categories. Some of the awards relate to types of writing, including abridged and unabridged fiction and non-fiction, and such genres as romance, fantasy and mystery; other awards recognize excellence in different styles of narration and production, such as multi-voiced performance and production values. Over the years, the structure and the categories of the awards have changed. These changes are reflected in the lists of the Audie award winners in the external links below.
The 2016 award ceremony was held May 11 at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and was hosted by Paula Poundstone.
Categories
Awards are given out in the following 29 categories only for works sold in the US that contain at least 51% spoken word content:
These are given to the Industry at the Audio Publishers Association conference: