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And the winning writer is ...

By MARGO HAMMOND
Published October 16, 2005

Last week was an award-filled one for books.

Monday, Irish-born John Banville captured the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Sea. Tuesday, Jon Stewart emceed the Quill Awards, the latest in the book world's prizes. Wednesday, John Grisham took time off from writing thrillers to announce the National Book Awards finalists from the Oxford home of his fellow Mississippian, William Faulkner, who was a two-time NBA winner.

In contrast to last year's more obscure selections, two bestsellers made this year's NBA list: E.L. Doctorow's novel The March and Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. The other fiction finalists are Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, Christopher Sorrentino's Trance, Rene Steinke's Holy Skirts and William T. Vollmann's Europe Central. The other nonfiction nominees are Alan Burdick's Out of Eden, Leo Damrosch's Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn's 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains.

NBA winners will be announced at a Nov. 16 ceremony in New York, with Garrison Keillor hosting and honorary medals going to Norman Mailer and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Winners will receive $10,000.

The payoff for the Booker is even higher: 50,000 pounds or about $88,000. Britain's most prestigious literary award also often makes a bestseller out of its winner: Sales of The Sea on the Internet shot up a whopping 300 percent the day after the award was announced. To cash in, Knopf announced it was moving up the U.S. publication of The Sea from March to next month.

Most Quill winners, on the other hand, already are bestsellers. The nominees were culled from bestseller lists and Publishers Weekly starred reviews. The final vote was left to readers invited to choose their favorites in 19 categories on the Internet.

According to the Associated Press, the voting turnout was so low under 25,000 a week that an exact number could not be tracked, but certainly more people were involved in choosing these awards than most prizes, which are traditionally picked by small panels of judges. As might be expected in a people's choice race, however, there were few surprises: Readers named J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince book of the year. Bestselling authors Deepak Chopra, David McCullough, Sue Monk Kidd, Shel Silverstein, Ann Brashares and Janet Evanovich were among the winners. (A complete list is at www.quillsliteracy.org.)

Perhaps the most provocative Quill was given in the poetry category, where readers picked a collection by Langston Hughes, the black poet of the Harlem Renaissance. The title poem, Let America Be America Again, first published in 1938, sadly is still relevant today.

There is no cash for Quill winners, but some of them will be able to watch themselves on television. An edited version of Tuesday's four-hour-plus ceremony will be shown on NBC Oct. 22 from 7-8 p.m. For those authors who didn't win this year, emcee Stewart, who took home two Quills for his satirical "civics textbook" America (The Book), gives some great advice:

"Get your own TV show."

[Last modified October 14, 2005, 12:38:03]