Massachusetts Book Awards

The Massachusetts Book Awards recognize significant achievements from the Massachusetts writing comunity in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, and children's literature. This year's awards ceremony will be held at the State House on November 20, 2008, in the Great Hall at 2 p.m. Below are a two of this year's Award Books. Click here for the complete list.

Fiction: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, written by MIT Writing Professor Junot Diaz (Cambridge). This wonderful novel of the immigrant experience is also a driving expose of the travails of the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of Trujillo. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Oscar Wao helps us to understand the experiences brought to Massachusetts by our newest residents.

Nonfiction: Salem Witch Judge by Eve LaPlante (Brookline) depicts the career of Samuel Sewell, the only judge to repent publicly his involvement in the witch trials. Sewell, a distant relation to LaPlante, went on to argue for the rights of Native Americans, for the abolition of slavery and for equal rights for women … all of this in 1600s Massachusetts.