Tyndale House Authors Win 2015 Christy Awards
Lisa Wingate’s The Story Keeper named best in Contemporary Fiction and Tracy Groot’s The Sentinels of Andersonville named best in Historical Fiction

Contact: Katie Dodillet
katiedodillet@tyndale.com
630.784.5275

CAROL STREAM, Ill.— June 30, 2015—Tyndale House Publishers is pleased to announce that Lisa Wingate and Tracy Groot both received Christy Awards at the 2015 Christy Awards ceremony, held on Monday, June 29, at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Fla. The sixteenth annual Christy celebration was held in conjunction with CBA’s International Christian Retail Show, taking place June 28–July 1 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. Christy Awards honor and promote excellence in Christian fiction.

According to Donna Kehoe, executive director of the Christy Awards, “The finalists this year represent the widest group of publishers in the history of the awards and also include an independently published novel. Several of the judges commented on the growing diversity and overall excellence of the novels submitted.”

Lisa Wingate’s The Story Keeper tells the story of Jen Gibbs, a successful New York editor, who discovers a decaying slush-pile manuscript on her desk. She has no idea that the story of Sarra, a young mixed-race woman trapped in Appalachia at the turn of the twentieth century, will both take her on a journey and change her forever. Jen is drawn into a mystery that leads her back to the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains—through doors she thought she had closed forever.

Tracy Groot’s The Sentinels of Andersonville is set near the end of the Civil War at Andersonville Prison, where inhumane conditions caused the deaths of 13,000 Union soldiers in only fourteen months. In this gripping and affecting novel, three young Confederates and an entire town come face-to-face with the prison’s atrocities and learn the cost of compassion, when withheld and when given.

Tyndale House Publishers, founded in 1962, is the world’s largest privately held Christian publisher of books, Bibles, and digital media. Tyndale has published many New York Times bestsellers. The largest portion of its profit goes to the nonprofit Tyndale House Foundation, which makes grants to help meet the physical and spiritual needs of people around the world. Tyndale was founded to publish Living Letters, which later comprised part of The Living Bible, a contemporary paraphrase of the Bible that became a global publishing phenomenon. Tyndale now publishes the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT), the translation of choice for millions of people.
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