Continuing their strong run in recent years, a number of Valley writers have won awards or honors in the 2023 Massachusetts Book Awards, the 23rd year of the competition.

Belchertown author and Hampshire College fiction professor Uzma Aslam Khan has won first place for fiction for her novel “The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali,” which follows the lives of two siblings in the Andaman Islands, in the Indian Ocean, a British possession used as a penal colony for Indians before it’s occupied by the Japanese during World War II.

The New York Times named Khan’s book one of the 10 best historical novels of 2022, calling it “a suspenseful, thought-provoking challenge to simple assumptions about enemies and friends, loyalty and betrayal.”

And Khan, author of four other novels, bested two well-known Massachusetts writers for this year’s fiction award: Geraldine Brooks of Martha’s Vineyard, whose most recent novel is “Horse,” and Celeste Ng of Cambridge, author most recently of “Our Missing Hearts.”

In addition, Jeannine Atkins of Whately has been awarded an Honors in Middle Grade/Young Adult Literature for “Hidden Powers,” a biography, written in verse, of Lise Meitner, an early 20th-century Austrian physicist who did groundbreaking research in nuclear fission, in part while battling Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic laws (Meitner escaped to Sweden in 1938).

And Emma Grove of Springfield has won an Honors in Nonfiction for “The Third Person,” a graphic memoir that explores the barriers to gender-affirming health care.

The awards are all for books published in 2022 and are issued by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. It’s a public-private partnership in Northampton that’s one of 50 such centers — one in each state — affiliated with a national center overseen by the Library of Congress that sponsors programs to support reading, literacy and libraries.

Each year, the Massachusetts organization issues awards in five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, middle grade/young adult literature, and picture books/early readers. For 2023, a new category was added in translated literature.

“These books reflect the remarkable talent and depth of the literary community in Massachusetts,” Courtney Andree, the center’s executive director, said in a statement. “Debut and seasoned authors have written powerful stories addressing contemporary issues and complicated personal and societal history.”

Several other Valley writers were long-listed for Massachusetts Book Awards this year, and past winners have included Martín Espada, Lesléa Newman, Ruth Ozeki, Ocean Vuong, and Jane Yolen, among others.

Other Massachusetts Book Award winners for 2023 include Ibram X. Kendi of Boston for nonfiction (“How to Raise an Antiracist”); Sara Deniz Akant of Cambridge for poetry (“Hyperphantasia”); and Malinda Lo of Arlington for middle grade/young adult literature (“A Scatter of Light”).

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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