Garcia Marquez Wins Fiction Prize

The winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction was Uzodinma Iweala's "Beasts of No Nation: A Novel" (HarperCollins) about civil war in West Africa. Other nominees included "Garner" by Kirstin Allio (Coffee House Press); "A Sudden Country" by Karen Fisher (Random House); "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" by Olga Grushin (Marian Wood, G.P. Putnam's Sons); and "John Crow's Devil" by Marlon James (Akashic Books).

Adam Hochschild won the history award for "Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves" (Houghton Mifflin) about the battle to abolish slavery in England. Other nominees: "Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia: 1941-1945" by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press); "The Third Reich in Power" by Richard J. Evans (Penguin Press); "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" by Tony Judt (Penguin Press); and "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln" by Sean Wilentz (W.W. Norton).

The award in the mystery and thriller category went to Robert Littell for "Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation" (Overlook Press), a story about the Central Intelligence Agency. Other nominees included "The Lincoln Lawyer" by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown); "The Right Madness" by James Crumley (Viking); "Ash & Bone" by John Harvey (Harcourt); and "Strange Affair" by Peter Robinson (William Morrow, HarperCollins).

In poetry the winner was Jack Gilbert's "Refusing Heaven" (Knopf). Other nominees included "Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems" by Gail Mazur (University of Chicago Press); "The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems" by Marilyn Nelson (Louisiana State University Press); "Luck is Luck" by Lucia Perillo (Random House); and "Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems" by Donald Revell (Alice James Books).

The winner in science and technology was "Before the Fallout: from Marie Curie to Hiroshima" by Diana Preston (Walker & Co.). Other nominees: "Endless Forms Most Beautiful: the New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom" by Sean B. Carroll (W.W. Norton); "Ice: The Nature, the History and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance" by Mariana Gosnell (Knopf); "Descent: The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss" by Brad Matsen (Pantheon); and "The Republican War on Science" by Chris Mooney (Basic Books).

In young adult fiction, the winner was Per Nilsson's "You & You & You," translated from the Swedish by Tara Chace (Front Street/Boyds Mills Press). Other nominees: "Looking for Alaska" by John Green (Dutton/Penguin Young Readers Group); "Black Juice" by Margo Lanagan (Eos/HarperCollins Children's Books); "The Center of the World" by Andreas Steinhofel, translated from the German by Alisa Jaffa (Delacorte Press/Random House Children's Books); and "I Am the Messenger" by Markus Zusak (Knopf/Random House Children's Books).