BTW News Briefs

The 2005 Great Lakes Book Award Winners

On Thursday, September 8, the Great Lakes Booksellers Association (GLBA) announced the 2005 Great Lakes Book Award winners. An Unfinished Season by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin) won for fiction; Bound for Canaan by Fergus M. Bordewich (Amistad/Harper Collins) won in the general category; Tonight I Said Goodbye by Michael Koryta (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press) in the Mystery/Intrigue category; and Bucking the Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House) won in the Children's category.

The awards will be presented at a luncheon on Friday, September 30, during GLBA's Fall Trade Show in Rosemont, Illinois. Winners will receive $500 and an award designed and produced by Pewabic Pottery, a historic maker of art tiles, ceramics, and glazes, based in Detroit. Winning titles are also featured in GLBA's holiday catalog, From Our Shelves to Yours: Books for Giving, which has a circulation of about 780,000 copies and is distributed through newspapers, mailings, and independent bookstores throughout the region. A marketing kit, consisting of posters and bookmarks, will be unveiled at the fall trade show and distributed to bookstore members in October.

The 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Shortlist

John Banville, Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, and Zadie Smith are the six authors shortlisted for the U.K.'s 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, John Sutherland, at a press conference at the Man Group offices in London on Thursday, September 8. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony in London on Monday, October 10.

The six shortlisted books are:

• Banville's The Sea (Pan MacMillan);
• Barnes' Arthur & George (Knopf);
• Barry's A Long Long Way (Viking);
• Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Knopf);
• Ali Smith's The Accidental (Pantheon); and
• Zadie Smith's On Beauty (Penguin).