The 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards winners have been announced

The 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards winners have been announced, and as seems to happen every year, the winning books are primarily all white authors. I don’t know why I am surprised every year but I am. But before we get into that, let’s take a look at the winners in each category.

The winner of the Fiction category was Yellowface by  R.F. Kuang, the winner of the Historical Fiction category was Weyward by Emilia Hart (she also won the Debut Novel), and the winner of the Mystery & Thriller category was The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden.

Romance had two categories this year: general Romance and Romantasy. The winners are perhaps the least surprising of them all. Emily Henry’s Happy Place won Romance and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros won Romantasy.

Leigh Bardugo won Fantasy with Hellbent and T.J Klune won Science Fiction for In the Lives of Puppet.

The results are in for the Goodreads Choice Awards

Stephen King took the Horror category with Holly (really??), Rebecca Ross won the Young Adult Fantasy with Divine Rivals, and Ali Hazelwood took Young Adult Fiction with Check & Mate.

On to nonfiction! The general Nonfiction category was won by Poverty By America by Matthew Desmond while the memoir category was won by THE Britney Spears and her memoir, The Woman in Me. If there is anyone who deserves an award for telling their story, it’s Britney.

For History & Biography, David Grann won with The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, and Humor was won by Henry Winkler and his book Being Henry: The Fonz . . . and Beyond.

This could possibly be the whitest group of Goodreads Choice Awards winners ever. It’s less diverse than last year, and there were only two non-white authors in the winning group last year. This year, there is one POC author and that’s R.F. Kuang and her book Yellowface. It’s almost ironic considering the book is a scathing rebuke of the publishing industry and how it deals with authors of color and their stories.

And considering Goodreads is getting rid of categories like middle grade and graphic novels rather than trying to fix their website (and the toxicity in some of the review sections) or look at why this keeps happening every year, it will likely only get worse in the future.