The André Simon Awards Winners 2025

Winners 2025

The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects by Bee Wilson has won this year's Food Award. Beginning with the moment a heart-shaped cake tin fell at the end of her marriage, Wilson explores the emotional meanings we attach to everyday kitchen objects. Blending personal experience with stories drawn from different cultures and histories, the book examines grief, memory, identity and the quiet power of domestic things.
Wines of Lebanon: The Journey Continues by Michael Karam has won 2025's Drink Award. With photography by Norbert Schiller, the book traces more than 7,000 years of Lebanese winemaking. A sequel to the award-winning Wines of Lebanon, it charts the evolution of a small but resilient wine industry shaped by conflict, political instability and renewal, while celebrating the people who sustain it.
The John Avery Award was awarded to Jane Masters MW and Andrew Neather for their book Rooted In Change: The Stories Behind Sustainable Wine. The book examines how climate change and sustainability are reshaping the global wine industry, tracing wine's journey from grape to glass while addressing environmental impact, social responsibility and the future of the trade.
The Special Commendation was awarded to Alissa Timoshkina for Kapusta: Vegetable-Forward Recipes from Eastern Europe. Centred on cabbage and other staple vegetables, the book celebrates Eastern European cooking through history, memory and women's voices. With chapters on dumplings and ferments, it highlights a tradition of nourishing, resourceful cooking shaped by resilience and care.

This year's shortlisted books - selected from over 140 submissions - also included:
How the World Eats: Where Our Food Comes From and Why It Matters (Julian Baggini, Granta)
La Mesa Mexicana (Rosa Cienfuegos, Smith Street Books)
Lugma: Abundant Dishes And Stories From My Middle East (Noor Murad, Quadrille),
Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking (Richard Hart, Hardie Grant Books),
The Science of Fermentation (Robin Sherriff, DK),
Filthy Queens: A History of Beer in Ireland (Dr Christina Wade, Nine Bean Rows),
Tequila, Mezcal & More (Anna Bruce, Octopus Publishing Group).

Our 2025 Assessors

Food Assessor Rowley Leigh

"The Heart-Shaped Tin is a very personal memoir focused on kitchen implements and accoutrements. Some may say it's not really a food book, but I don't give a damn - it's about the emotional involvement in cooking. It stands out on the shelf both on a scholarly and an emotional level. The writing is beautiful, understated, and the emotion is so clearly there without being expressly stated. I think it's exceptional - a very, very good book. Kapusta is a rather original book from Eastern Europe, mostly based on vegetables, and for its political backstory it was truly worthy of a commendation. I found it delightfully fresh and focused. It has a great deal of charm and I loved the structure, simple chapters built around different vegetables. The recipes are ones I genuinely wanted to cook. It feels like what a cookbook should be about.""

Drink Assessor Alice Lascelles

"Wines of Lebanon: The Journey Continues book brilliantly captures the personality, colour and phenomenally complex culture of this extraordinary country - which, as I discovered when I visited Lebanon myself, is essential if you want to understand the wines. Full of knowledge, affection, humour and expertise - and cleverly-designed too. An essential read for both pros and enthusiasts . It makes me yearn to go back. An impressive book that tackles the urgent, but also complex, subject of sustainability in a very readable way. Illustrated with engaging case studies from wineries around the world, and blessedly short on jargon, it turns what could easily have been a depressing or dogmatic read into something extremely galvanizing."