The New England Booksellers Association announced the winners of the 2001 New England Book Awards. In past years, the winners have participated in a ceremony at the Boston Public Library in the spring, but this year's presentations will be held at the Sunday morning breakfast at the NEBA Trade Show on October 7.
The New England Book Awards are given annually to an author who lives in New England for a body of work. This year's winners include Elinor Lipman for Fiction, whose most recent novel, The Dearly Departed (Random House), has just been published, and naturalist Robert Finch for Nonfiction, whose Death of a Hornet: And Other Cape Cod Essays (Counterpoint) came out in paperback this spring. The second edition of The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by Finch, is due out in February. The award for Literary Excellence was given to John Edgar Wideman, whose basketball memoir, Hoop Roots (Houghton Mifflin), will be published in October. YA novelist Joan Bauer, whose Hope Was Here (Putnam) was selected as a 2001 Newbery Honor book, received the award for Children's Books.
