Friend, colleague and fine writer Helon Habila won the top honor in fiction at the 11th annual Library of Virginia Literary Awards. His novel, Measuring Time, shared the fiction prize with Janet Peery’s What the Thunder Said. Habila is a professor at George Mason University, and an excerpt from his novella-in-progress Oil on Water has recently been published in Mason’s Cornerstone magazine.
Other awards went to R.T. Smith’s Outlaw Style for poetry; to Wesley C. Hogan’s Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America for nonfiction; and to Rita Dove for lifetime achievement.