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Winners Announced for 2003 Connecticut Book Awards

2003 Connecticut Book Awards Ceremony
 

November 19, 2003…Winners were announced for the second annual Connecticut Book Awards Sunday, November 16, in the city hall atrium in downtown Hartford.

An audience of 130 attended to pay tribute to the state’s authors and illustrators in an award ceremony presented by the Connecticut Center for the Book, a program of the Hartford Public Library.        

The awards, an annual event for the Connecticut Center for the Book, were made after 40 judges distinguished in the fields of writing, librarianship, book arts, academe, journalism and publishing considered more than 100 nominations for work published in 2002. The winners, current or former state residents or authors whose work had a Connecticut setting, were chosen in seven categories as well as for a Lifetime Achievement award.

The 2003 Connecticut Book Award winners are:

·        Lifetime Achievement for Service to the Literary Community: Rennie McQuilkin, former director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington and founder of Antrim House, a publisher of poetry collections;

·        Memoir: Bob Smith for Hamlet’s Dresser, his account of growing up with a severely retarded sister and how the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford helped him find himself and his life’s work;

 ·        Children’s Author: Bruce Clements for A Chapel of Thieves, a story set in 1849 in which the young     hero travels from St. Louis to Paris to save his brother from a gang of thieves;

·        Children’s Illustrator: David A. Johnson for Abraham Lincoln by Amy Cohn and Suzy Schmidt, which he illustrated with pen and watercolor drawings;

·        Design: Jessica Helfand for Reinventing the Wheel, a history of the wheel-within-a-wheel information devices called volvelles and their influence on modern interactive design;

·        Fiction: Stewart O’Nan for Wish You Were Here, a novel about a family that spends one last vacation together before their summer cottage is sold;

·        Non-Fiction: Robert Thorson for Stone by Stone, the University of Connecticut geology and geophysics professor’s exploration of how New England’s physical and human history can be understood by studying its stone walls;

·        and, Poetry: Vivian Shipley for When There Is No Shore, the latest collection by the prize-winning poet, professor and editor of the Connecticut Review.

Helen Sheehy, author of Eleonora Duse, the engaging biography of the legendary Italian actress, was the keynote speaker and spoke of her early training in theater and how it meshes with her writing. “Using imagination, sense memory, empathy, and research, just as an actor imagines a character and makes her come to life, so the biographer takes the raw material of letters, notes, interviews, newspaper clippings, reviews, books read, places lived—never inventing facts but freely imagining and choosing the form those facts will take—and the biographer breathes life into her character, ” said Sheehy.

John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, also spoke and Richard Sugarman, president of The Connecticut Forum, served as master of ceremonies. Stuart Lamson of Bank Square Books in Mystic supplied the titles for the book signing during the awards reception.  Eighteen authors were present to sign their works.

The mission of the Connecticut Center for the Book is to celebrate books, writers and readers who engender and sustain the life of the imagination and to highlight authors, illustrators, printers and the literary heritage of the state of Connecticut. The Connecticut Center for the Book is an affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

For more information call (860) 695-6320 or email klyons@hplct.org.