It’s been a long but very exciting Premier League season. In some ways, the season has flown by. The close title race between Manchester United and Liverpool has been incredible to watch. There have been so many scandals off the field. On it, we’ve seen some wonderful goals and brilliant play. We’ve seen Hull City rise and fall. We’ve seen massive transfer sums. And we still have just over one week to go.

To close out the season, EPL Talk today has launched the inaugural 2008-2009 EPL Awards to honour the very best of the Premier League season. Instead of an awards competition that’s launched at the end of the year or before the season ends, we felt it was better to wait until the end of the season so the entire 38 games can be taken into account to sum up the best that the Premier League has to offer.

The EPL Awards are open to the public for voting and are quite comprehensive. We have a total of 40 categories to vote in — everything from the best footballers, managers, teams all the way up to the best radio shows, podcasts, blogs, bloggers, books, commentators and more.

To make it easier, we’ve broken the voting into three main categories:

This way, you can vote in as many categories as you like. One vote per person in each sub-category. Polls close on Sunday, May 31st at midnight ET.

The 2008/2009 EPL Awards will become quite heated as the best of the best compete against each other. Some categories will undoubtedly be very close to call. But even after you’ve voted, you can return to the categories to check in on how many votes your favorites have garnered thus far.

Personally I’m particular interested in seeing who wins the EPL Player Of The Year category. There was so much controversy after Ryan Giggs was announced as the winner, so it’ll be interesting to see who the public picks as the best of the best for this season.

Lastly, some background information about the awards. The contestants within each poll were chosen by myself and the writers of EPL Talk. As much as we would have liked to include wonderful blogs such as DuNord and The Original Winger in this year’s competition, we’re limiting the contestants to only those sites and podcasts who are entirely or mainly focused on the Premier League. The contestants had to have their works published during the 2008/2009 season. When voting, please keep in mind that the body of work is based on how well each contestant has done during the 2008/2009 season only. And finally, EPL Talk and its writers and podcast are excluded from being nominated in the respective categories — so that the awards competition is fair and not skewed in our favour.

The winners will be announced during the first week of June. Go ahead and vote today, and best of luck to each contestant.