The Grammys are an annual award ceremony that celebrates and recognizes audio content, and mostly focuses on music. They trophy that winners are awarded is a gold-colored gramophone, and the winners are chosen by the voters of the Recording Academy; these are music industry professionals. Many awards are handed out across musical genres, like Album Of The Year; Best Rock Song; Best Traditional R&B Performance; and Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album. As part of their slate of awards, there’s a Best Spoken Word Album category and this includes audiobooks and poetry. To be eligible for the Grammys of a specific year, the recording must have been released within a specific time period. According to the Grammys website, the ballots “subject to classification and qualifications under rules or regulations approved by the Board of Trustees. From time to time, the Board may vote to amend the qualification criteria for consideration for a GRAMMY Award or other award.” For the official rules and regulations for the 2021 Grammys, click here. Authors that have won Grammys for audiobooks in the last 20 years, of books that they wrote, are: Rachel Maddow, Michelle Obama, President Jimmy Carter, Carrie Fisher, Carol Burnett, Joan Rivers, Stephen Colbert, Janis Ian, and Betty White. There’s also Jon Stewart, Michael J. Fox, President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Maya Angelou, and Quincy Jones. An audiobook of Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth also won a Grammy, but he was not the narrator.
5 Examples of Grammy-Winning Audiobooks
“It took Angelou fifteen years to write the final volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung up to Heaven (2002). The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned from Ghana in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother’s table and began to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1968,” according to the Foundation. They also said that, “Angelou hesitated so long to start the book and took so long to finish it, she told Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service interviewer Sherryl Connelly, because so many painful things happened to her, and to the entire African-American community, in those four years.” When she won in 2002, fellow nominees were Nothing is Impossible by Christopher Reeve; The Great Gatsby by Tim Robbins; The Kids Stay In the Picture by Robert Evans; and Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox.
