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November 20 – November 27, 2008 Edition Matthiessen Wins
National Book
Award for Fiction

NEW YORK, NY (Authorlink News, November 20, 2008)–The National Book Foundation temporarily forgot the gloomy economy Wednesday night and revealed the names of this year’s National Book Awards at a glittering black tie affair in Cipriani Italian Restaurant on Wall Street. Each author received a $10,000 prize for his or her work.

The winners are:

Fiction: Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library) – Interview Nonfiction: Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company) –Interview Young People’s Literature: Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic) – Interview Poetry: Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems
(HarperCollins) – Interview

Peter Matthiessen, age 81, won the fiction prize for his Shadow Country,  an epic of American rise and descent and a wrenching story of familial, racial, and environmental degradation stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

The awards were founded in 1950 by the nonprofit National Book Foundation. For more on the winning authors, see http://www.nationalbook.org