The NYC Big Book Award 2025 recognized Billy Waters Is Dancing: Or, How A Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale, 2024) as winner in the category of History – World.
The competition is judged by experts from different aspects of the book industry, including publishers, writers, editors, designers, booksellers, librarians and professional copywriters. Winners and distinguished favorites are based on overall excellence.
Billy Waters Is Dancing: Or, How A Black Sailor Found Fame in Regency Britain (Yale, 2024)
Every child in Regency London knew Billy Waters, the celebrated “King of the Beggars.” Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, he became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London’s most famous street performer. His extravagantly costumed image blazed across the stage and in print to an unprecedented degree.
For all his contemporary renown, Waters died destitute in 1823—but his legend would live on for decades.
Mary L. Shannon’s biography draws together surviving traces of Waters’ life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them. Considering Waters’ influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular culture. This is a vital attempt to recover a life from historical obscurity—and a fascinating account of what it meant to find fame in the Regency metropolis.
NYC Big Book Award received book submissions worldwide. Journalists, well established authors, small and large press, and first time indie authors participated in record numbers. Entries this year were received from the United States as well as countries such as Australia, Canada, China, Dubai, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Scotland, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Cities represented among the entries were Chicago, Hamburg, Los Angeles, Melbourne, New York, Quebec, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, and Victoria.
Publishers included Berrett-Koehler; Brown Books Kids; Central Avenue / Simon & Schuster; Forbes Books; Muse Literary; New Harbinger Publications; New York University Press; Oxford University Press; Pegasus Books; She Writes Press; University of Massachusetts Press to name a few.
Winners included “What is My Legacy?” by Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters King, Marc Kielburger and Craig Kielburger; “Mikhail Gorbachev – How he changed our lives” by Bettina Schaefer; Berrett-Koehler’s “From Founder to Future: A Business Roadmap to Impact, Longevity, and Employee Ownership” by John Abrams; The Cooking Lab’s “Modernist Bread at Home” by Nathan Myhrvold; and “Wild Fox Ridge” by Xue Mo to name some key titles on the awarded list.
“With so many quality publishers and authors from around the world participating this year, I’m eager to share these books with a global readership,” said awards sponsor Gabby Olczak.
To view the list of NYC Big Book winners and distinguished favorites, please visit: https://www.nycbigbookaward.com/
NYC Big Book Award, https://www.nycbigbookaward.com/, is announced every fall. NYC Big Book Award is open to all authors, publishers, and illustrators, and includes submissions from the big five publishers including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.
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Mary L. Shannon 
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