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Two of last year's most highly praised books by Washington writers are among the six titles that will receive 2006 Washington State Book Awards.
Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time" will be honored as the best work of history/biography, while Karen Fisher's "A Sudden Country" will be honored as best novel. Egan's haunting look at the Dust Bowl in the 1930s proved to be the most popular book ever by the Seattle-based correspondent for The New York Times, while Fisher's poetic account of life on the Oregon Trail has already garnered several national honors, including being a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award.
This year's winners seem destined to avoid the sort of controversy over omitted titles that dogged the annual competition in the 1990s when it was known as the Governor's Writers Award.
Other winners of 2006 State Book Awards are:
Michael Gruber of Seattle in young-adult books for "The Witch's Boy."
Karla Kuskin of Bainbridge Island and Betsy Lewin (illustrator) of Brooklyn, N.Y., in children's picture books for "So, What's It Like to Be a Cat?"
John Marzluff of Snohomish and Tony Angell of Seattle in general non-fiction for "In the Company of Crows and Ravens."
Lucia Perillo of Olympia in poetry for "Luck Is Luck."
Each winner will receive a $1,000 honorarium at the festive State Book Awards ceremony to be held on Oct. 18 at Seattle's Central Library.
Also to be honored that evening will be Ursula K. LeGuin, the multitalented writer from Portland, who will receive the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers Award for her distinguished body of work. Previous winners of that award, which also conveys a $1,000 honorarium, include Ivan Doig, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Raban, Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver.
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