Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 16, 1995 TAG: 9511160069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Short
Tina Rosenberg's ``The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism'' (Random House Inc.) was the nonfiction winner. Stanley Kunitz won the poetry award for his ``Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected'' (W.W. Norton).
Historian David McCullough received the National Book Foundation's annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. McCullough won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of President Truman, and is known to millions of TV viewers as the narrator of PBS's ``The American Experience'' and ``The Civil War.''
Rosenberg said she was ``thrilled and stunned'' to win the nonfiction award, and Kunitz, who is 90, thanked editor Carol Houcksmith ``for confidence in my work and for offering me a three-book contract.
``I think there is a hunger for poetry that is beginning to assert itself, partly a reaction to the banality, the cliche-ridden speech we hear every day on the streets and over the airwaves - the virulence and outrageousness of political dialogue,'' Kunitz said.
Roth, suffering from bronchial flu, did not attend the ceremony.
He has been nominated six times but won just once before, in 1960. His latest, ``Sabbath's Theater'' (Houghton Mifflin), about an aging puppeteer and the death of his mistress, is his 21st.
by CNB