Book Awards: February 2008 Archives

Barnes & Noble has announced that Kate Braestrup's memoir, Here If You Need Me, and Joshua Ferris' debut novel, Then We Came to the End — both published by Little, Brown — are the winners of the 15th annual Discover Great New Writers Awards. Each author will receive $10,000 and a year of additional marketing and advertising support.

Publisher's Weekly gave starred reviews to both books.

On Braestrup's: "It may take ingenuity to interest browsers in a memoir by a middle-aged mother who, 11 years ago, was suddenly widowed, then became a Unitarian-Universalist minister, and now works as chaplain to game wardens in Maine. But good memoir writing does not depend on celebrity or adventure ... and Braestrup's insightful essays are extraordinarily well written, mingling elements of police procedural and touching love story with trenchant observations about life and death."

On Ferris': "At once delightfully freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression."

Second place winners ($5,000 each): Elizabeth Samet for Soldier's Heart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Matthew Eck for The Farther Show (Milkweed Editions).

Third place ($2,500 each): Yaroslav Trofimov for The Siege of Mecca (Doubleday); Vendela Vida for Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco).

Note: Chicago writer and former Sun-Timesman Robert Kurson (Shadow Divers and Crashing Through) served on this year's nonfiction jury panel.

NEW YORK (AP) — Poet Tom Sleigh’s Space Walk has been named this year’s winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a $100,000 prize given to someone "who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the acknowledged pinnacle of his or her career."

Janice N. Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, a debut collection, received the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Administered by Claremont Graduate University, based in Claremont, Calif., the awards were established in the early 1990s by Kate Tufts in honor of her late husband, poet Kingsley Tufts. Previous winners include Alan Shapiro, Carl Phillips and Michael Ryan.

NEW YORK (AP) — A biography of Gen. Robert E. Lee and a book about the relationship between President Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass were this year’s winners of the Lincoln Prize for Civil War scholarship.

James Oakes, author of The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, and Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, each will receive $20,000.

‘‘James Oakes and Elizabeth Brown Pryor have made major contributions to our understanding of leaders who — by their writing, political leadership, and military genius, and by either their capacity for, or resistance to, change — altered the way America regards both itself and its people,’’ Lincoln Prize founders Richard Gilman and Lewis Lehrman said in a statement Tuesday, Lincoln’s 199th birthday.

Previous winners of the award, founded in 1990, include Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln.