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NEW YORK, Nov 16, 2006 (UPI via COMTEX) -- A history of the Dust Bowl and a novel about a man who can't remember the people closest to him were the big winners at the National Book Awards gala in New York.
Richard Powers received the fiction award Wednesday night for "The Echo Maker: while Timothy Egan won the non-fiction honors for "The Worst Hard Times," which drew on the final recollections of those who suffered through the epic drought during the Great Depression.
"The Echo Maker" was also set in the heartland and revolves around the annual sandhill crane migration and a man who is stricken with a brain disorder called Capgras syndrome.
"I began thinking in a broader way about this whole question of recognition and non-recognition, familiarity and strangeness," Powers said in an interview released by the University of Illinois where he is a writer-in-residence
Other winners Wednesday included M.T. Anderson for young people's literature and Nathaniel Mackey for poetry. The Literarian Award for outstanding service went to New York Review of Books co-founders Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers.
URL: www.upi.com Copyright 2006 by United Press International
