National book critics name award winners

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times book critic

	Edward P. Jones
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The winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award were announced in New York City last night.

Edward P. Jones took the fiction award for his first novel, "The Known World," about a small circle of black slave-owners in pre-Civil War Virginia. "The Known World" was also a National Book Award nominee. When the book appeared last year, this critic wrote: "Its portrait of black, white and Cherokee slave owners whose 'property ... could hear and speak and think' is remarkably complex."

The winner of the nonfiction award was Paul Hendrickson's "Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy," about seven Mississippi sheriffs photographed by Life magazine, with billy clubs in hand, as they are about to do battle against an anti-integration riot on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1962.

"Khrushchev: The Man and His Era" by William Taubman, a life of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, drawing on material released in Russia since 1991, took the biography prize.

The prize for criticism went to Rebecca Solnit for "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West." In it, Solnit posits that the work of the legendary 19th-century photographer, along the advent of railroads and the telegraph, played a role in transforming the public's experience of space and time. Susan Stewart won the poetry prize for her collection "Columbarium."

A lifetime achievement award was given to 91-year-old oral historian Studs Terkel, whose books include "Working," "Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression," and, most recently, "Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times."

The National Book Critics Circle Award comes with no cash prize but confers considerable prestige on its winners. Past winners include "Atonement" by Ian McEwan, "Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt and "Bad Land" by Seattle writer Jonathan Raban.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com

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