THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407210741
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF REPORT
LENGTH: Short : 32 lines
Novelists Bobbie Ann Mason and Lewis Nordan and nonfiction writer John Berendt will receive the Southern Book Critics Circle's 1994 Southern Book Awards, and historian C. Vann Woodward will be honored with the Distinguished Service Award for lifetime achievement, the critics circle has announced.
The awards will be presented Oct. 9 during the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tenn.
Mason, recognized for her novel Feather Crowns (HarperCollins), and Nordan, honored for his novel Wolf Whistle (Algonquin Books), tied for the fiction award, the first time a tie has occurred since the awards began in 1991.
Berendt won for his best seller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Random House).
Other finalists included: for fiction, William Baldwin, The Hard to Catch Mercy (Algonquin), and David Payne, Ruin Creek (Doubleday); and for nonfiction, Larry Brown, On Fire (Algonquin), and Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford University Press).
To qualify for the Southern Book Awards, a book must be about the South or set in the South. The author need not be a Southerner.
Southern Book Critics Circle membership includes book-review editors and free-lance book reviewers throughout the South. by CNB