National Book Award Winners Announced
There was no question a New Yorker would win this year's prize for fiction -- all five nominees were female New Yorkers. Lily Tuck won for historical epic The News from Paraguay, based on the life of Ella Lynch, mistress of the Paraguayan leader Francisco Solano Lopez. The non-fiction prize went to Kevin Boyle for Arc of Justice : A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age; the winner in poetry was Jean Valentine for Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems. The annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was awarded to children's author Judy Blume, whom the American Library Association has named the nation's most censored author due to her frank depictions of pubescent growing pains.