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Literary Arts announced the Oregon Book Awards last night in an event at Portland Center Stage at The Armory, hosted by poet and author Kwame Alexander. Out of 37 finalists, judges chose winners across seven genre categories, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, young adult and graphic literature.
The prestigious Ken Kesey Award for Fiction went to Patrick deWitt (in absentia) for The Librarianist, a novel about retired librarian Bob Comet who lives in his childhood home in Portland. Judge Allison Escoto called it: “a bittersweet, nostalgic story about youthful recollection and surprising late-in-life second acts.”
Josephine Woolington won the general nonfiction category for her debut book of essays about the natural world, Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest, published by Portland State University’s student-run Ooligan Press. Topics include sandhill cranes, camas, the Western bumble bee, huckleberry and gray whales.
“Where We Call Home is a series of beautifully written essays…that celebrate the rich history and complex future of the Pacific Northwest,” wrote judge Chris Mathers Jackson.
More than two dozen people from Ooligan showed up to support Woolington at the event, making for one of the most exciting prizes of the night. Woolington is a former reporter for The Register-Guard in Eugene.
Erica Berry took the creative nonfiction category for Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. Berry’s book begins with ruminations on wolves and then “moves freely from history to memoir to observations and everything in between,” according to the judges.
“Everlasting thank you to the judges who called it ‘pure alchemy’ (sob),” Berry wrote on social media.
The Oregon Book Awards & Fellowships program has awarded more than $1.5 million to over 1,000 authors since it began in 1987.
See the full list of the 2024 Oregon Book Award winners here.