2006 National Book Awards

RICHARD POWER’s The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), the story of a young man who develops a rare brain disorder after an automobile accident in Nebraska, has won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction while Seattle-based New York Times reporter Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), a fascinating account of the dust storms that ravaged the Great Plains during the Depression, won for Nonfiction.

Nathaniel Mackey received the award for Poetry for Splay Anthem (New Directions Publishing, 2006). The award for Young People’s Literature went to M.T. Anderson for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press, 2006).