Biennial Literary Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Biennial Literary Awards are and who runs them

The Biennial Literary Awards are a public-vote book awards program run by the New Hampshire Writers' Project, a statewide literary organization whose mailing address is PO Box 10034, Bedford, NH 03110. The ballot sits at nhwritersproject.org/2025-biennial-literary-awards/ on the organizer's own domain, which means the rules, the category list and the form all live in one place under NHWP's control.

The 2025 cycle is billed on the awards page as the 16th New Hampshire Literary Awards, under the tagline Celebrating Excellence in New Hampshire Literature. In the best-of vertical, readers rather than the judging panel alone decide which nominated books win, by voting for their favorite books in each category during a published voting window.

Because the organizer hosts the ballot itself, everything a supporter or a nominated author needs is published on nhwritersproject.org, from the rules and submission guidelines to the voting form. That single-host setup is the main structural difference between this program and the readers-choice contests that run on commercial platforms elsewhere in the state.

The dated schedule for the 2025 cycle

The 2025 cycle has a fully dated published schedule. Nominations opened in February 2025 and ran through a June 2025 deadline, with a hard rule attached: all nomination materials had to be postmarked no later than that June date. Eligible books are those published within the eligibility period the page defines, covering titles published in 2023 and 2024, and every submission is read and evaluated by a panel of judges vetted and assembled by the NH Writers' Project Literary Awards Committee.

The public voting period then ran from September 8 through October 1, 2025, during which readers could vote for their favorite books in each category. The awards page counted down to the nomination close, which is why the June date appears in a countdown banner at the top of the ballot.

Confirmed editions of the program exist for 2023, 2024 and 2025, and the 2025 page bills the program as the 16th New Hampshire Literary Awards. The voting page prints no dates for a finalist or winner announcement round; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

For a supporter, the practical reading of this schedule is simple: the nomination phase and the voting phase are separate spans with their own deadlines, and missing the June postmark date ends a book's run before any public voting begins.

How a supporter votes on the 2025 ballot

The mechanic is deliberately plain. During the voting period the organizer makes a voting form available online, and a supporter votes for their favorite books in each category. The printed rule is that each person may vote once per category, so the form is built around a single pass through the category list rather than daily returns.

The category list printed on the awards page is: Fiction, with Romance, Historical, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, LGBTQ+, Military, Horror, Multicultural, Suspense and Thriller groupings, then Crime Nonfiction, Travel and History. The page presents these under a categories heading, and a supporter chooses within them on the form itself.

The page does not describe any login, account or verification step for the voting form, and it sets out no eligibility wording for who may cast a ballot beyond the once-per-category rule. Those details, where they exist, are whatever the live form asks for when it loads.

What this means in practice is that a supporter's entire participation fits into a single session: open the form during the September 8 to October 1 window, pick a favorite in each category worth backing, and submit. There is no daily return to schedule and no nomination step for voters, since nominations closed months earlier in June.

Where this ballot sits among New Hampshire vote programs

New Hampshire carries a busy slate of public-vote programs, and the Biennial Literary Awards are the literary outlier among them. The neighboring ballots on this site are all best-of readers-choice contests: Best of the Lakes Region and Best of the Seacoast cover regions, while CommunityVotes Manchester covers a single city.

Two statewide general ballots also run alongside it, Best of NH and Best of NH, and those compete for the same statewide audience this literary program draws. What separates the Biennial Literary Awards is its subject and its host: it celebrates books and authors rather than local businesses, and it runs on the New Hampshire Writers' Project's own domain instead of a commercial voting platform.

That hosting choice shapes the experience in concrete ways. There is no platform-level nomination gallery or business profile page, no third-party branding on the form, and the schedule is set by the organizer rather than by a platform's seasonal calendar. A reader who knows the regional best-of ballots should expect a quieter, more editorial page here, with the judging panel's role, the eligibility period and the category list printed alongside the voting form.

Building support for a nominated book

Support for a nominated book in this program comes from readers, and the once-per-category rule shapes what outreach can achieve. A supporter who has read a book can back it in its category, so the useful move for an author or a publisher is to reach readers during the September 8 to October 1, 2025 window and point them at the voting form on nhwritersproject.org, rather than asking anyone to return day after day.

The organizer's own structure helps here: the awards page prints the category list and the voting period together, so a single shared link gives a reader both the deadline and the choices. Because submissions are also read by an NHWP judging panel, public support and judged evaluation sit side by side in this program, which is unusual among the state's public ballots.

For outreach methods that fit a public ballot of this kind, see how to get more votes online. The honest framing for this program is that reach, not repetition, moves the result, since the printed rule already caps each person at a single vote per category.