The Texas Institute of Letters presented 13 awards totaling $22,700 for
outstanding literary accomplishments at its Saturday, April 14, annual awards
banquet held at the Park Cities Hilton Hotel in
Dallas.
Fifteen new members were announced at the meeting.
Cormac McCarthy won the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction in 2006
for his novel, The Road, published by
Knopf. The prize brings a cash award of $6,000.
Lawrence Wright’s book on the origins of terrorism,
The
Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, also published by Knopf, took
top honors in the Carr P. Collins Award for non-fiction with a prize of $5,000.
Recognized as the Lon Tinkle Award winner,
given for excellence sustained throughout a career, was William D.
Wittliff, cited as accomplished publisher, writer,
photographer, director, producer and screenwriter. Witliff,
a former president of the Texas Institute of Letters, received a cash prize of
$1,500.
Other winners follow:
TIL Award for Most Significant Scholarly
Book, $2,500, to Jerry Thompson, Civil War to the Bloody End: The Life and
Times of Major General Samuel P. Heintzelman,
published by Texas A&M Press.
Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Best Book
of Poetry, $1,200, to Christopher Bakken for Goat
Funeral, published by Sheep-Meadow.
Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First
Fiction, $1,000, to Dominic Smith for The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre,
published by Atria.
Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translation of
a Book, $1,000, to Marian Schwartz, for her translation from Russian of Ruben
Gallego’s White on Black, published by John Murray.
O. Henry Award for Best Work of Magazine
Journalism, $1,000, to John Spong for “The Good Book
and the Bad Book,” published in Texas Monthly, September 2006.
Stanley
Walker
Award for Best Work of Newspaper Journalism Appearing in Newspaper or Sunday
Supplement, $1,000, to Tony Freemantle for “The
Gulf
Coast
Revisited,”
Houston
Chronicle.
Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story, $750, to Mark Wisniewski
for “Prisoners of War,” published in Glimmer Train.
Friends of the Austin Public Library Award
for Best Children’s Book, $500, to Tim Tingle for Crossing Bok
Chitto: A Choctaw Tale of Friendship and Freedom,
Cinco Puntos Press.
Friends of the Austin Public Library Award
for Best Young Adult Book, $500, to Heather Hepler
for Scrambled Eggs at Midnight, published by Dutton.
Fred Whitehead Award for Best
Design of a Trade Book, $750, to Mary Ann Jacob for Timeless
Texas,
Texas A&M Press.
New members introduced at the meeting were
Kent Biffle, Rockwall; Ty
Cashion, Huntsville; Deborah Crombie, McKinney;
Charles Dameron, Brownsville; A.W. (Bill) Gray,
Dallas; Stephen Graham Jones, Lubbock; Richard G. Lowe, Denton; R. Lee
Maril, Greenville, S.C., Karen Olsson, Austin; Ron
Rozelle, Lake Jackson; Bill Sloan, Dallas; Willard
Spiegelman, Dallas; Claude Stanush,
San Antonio; Andrés Tijerina, Austin; and Betty
Wiesepape, Richardson.
Special tributes were paid to two TIL members, Allen Maxwell and Audrey
Slate. Maxwell, 91, of
Dallas
was cited for his long service to
Texas
letters and for 61 years of continuous TIL membership. His career includes
service as director of the SMU Press, editor of Southwest Review, vice
president of TIL, and book editor of The
Dallas Morning News.
Slate was cited for 33 years of “extraordinary service” as director of
the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship Program.
The Texas Institute of Letters was founded in
Dallas
in 1936 during the
Texas Centennial to
stimulate interest in
Texas
letters, to recognize distinctive achievement in the field, and to promote
fellowship among those interested in the literary and cultural development of
the state. Its current president is Fran Vick of
Dallas.