NBA 2005 Winners

Congrats to the 4 winners of the National Book Award:

William Vollman for fiction, "Europe Central," pictured (left) with presenter Andre Dubus III.

Joan Didion won the non-fiction prize for "The Year of Magical Thinking."

The award for young people's literature went to Jeanne Birdsall for her debut novel, "The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits and a Very Interesting Boy."

The poetry prize was awarded to W. S. Merwin, the Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the great American living poets, who had been nominated seven previous times for the National Book Award but never won. His most recent volume, "Migration: New and Selected Poems," was published by Copper Canyon Press.

Several of the sentences above were lifted from the New York Times article on the awards.

For those of you following BillyBlog, you may realize that I was 0 for 4, a complete and utter goose-egg on predicting the winners.