The awards, administered by the Washington Center for the Book, honor works of outstanding literary merit by Washington authors.
A former Seattle Times reporter is among the winners of the Washington State Book Awards (formerly called the Governor’s Writers Awards), announced Saturday in a ceremony at the Seattle Public Library’s Central Library.
Claudia Rowe’s “The Spider and the Fly,” a memoir about her reporter-subject relationship with a serial killer, won the award for biography/memoir. Laurie Frankel’s novel “This Is How It Always Is,” about a family facing issues of gender identity, won the award for fiction; “Mozart’s Starling,” a study of songbirds by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, won for nonfiction. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s collection “Water & Salt” won the prize for poetry. Rowe, Frankel and Haupt are all residents of Seattle; Tuffaha lives in Redmond.
The awards, administered by the Washington Center for the Book, honor works of outstanding literary merit by Washington authors.
In the Books for Youth categories, the winners were “Shawn Loves Sharks” by Curtis Manley, of Bellevue (picture book); “Zoey and Sassafras: Dragons and Marshmallows” by Asia Citro, of Issaquah (books for young readers, ages 6-8); “The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming” by J. Anderson Coats, of Everett (books for middle readers, ages 9-12); and “The Arsonist” by Stephanie Oakes, of Spokane (books for young-adult readers, ages 13-18).
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A special award was given to Tod Marshall and the poets in “WA 129,” a collection of 129 poems by Washington poets published by Sage Hill Press in Spokane. Marshall worked on this collection during his time as Washington State Poet Laureate; poets represented in the collection include Quenton Baker, Claudia Castro Luna, Kathleen Flenniken, Tess Gallagher, Rebecca Hoogs, Priscilla Long, Shin Yu Pai, Katrina Roberts, Tom Robbins, Katharine Whitcomb and 120 others.
Two panels of judges read a total of 230 books for awards consideration. To be eligible, authors must have been born in Washington state or be a current resident and have maintained residence here for at least three years.