Vietnam War Story Wins National Book Award

The National Book Award for fiction has been won by Denis Johnson (left) for Tree of Smoke, a novel which, according to Motoko Rich in the New York Times:

... features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers

Johnson has previously published numerous novels, short stories, plays and poems, and won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for Train Dreams in 2002.

Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, won the non-fiction prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.

Weiner (right) has been writing on American intelligence to for twenty years, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on national security programmes. This book tells the history of the CIA and highlights its failures.

Here's the author talking about his book:


The prize for young people’s literature went to Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian:

... an autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who leaves his poverty-stricken reservation school and moves to a wealthy, all-white school.

while the poetry prize went to former poet laureate Robert Hass for Time and Materials: Poems 1997 to 2005.

Essayist and novelist Joan Didion was honoured with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.