Desai novel wins another prize

NEW YORK - Kiran Desai, who already snared the Man Booker Prize in October for her novel

The Inheritance of Loss

(Grove/Atlantic), last night added the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction at the organization's annual ceremony at New School University here.

"I think I'm the luckiest girl in the world," she said, acknowledging her novelist mother, Anita Desai, among others, and adding, "I think it's the ideas in this book that people are responding to."

The prize for biography went to Julie Phillips for James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martins). Phillips' book investigated the many lives of Sheldon, a CIA agent-turned-sci-fi writer. "This is one of those moments when I feel it would be really useful to invent another persona," Phillips quipped, an apparent reference to her own shyness.

The poetry prize went to Troy Jollimore for Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/Intuit House), the young poet's first book. "I'm stunned," he joked, "and I may not be the only one."

Lawrence Wechsler took the criticism prize for Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney's).

Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco) won the prize for nonfiction. Schama's history covers the little-known story of Revolutionary-era black slaves who fought for the British.

The winner in memoir/autobiography was Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins). Despite the serious subject of his book - the Holocaust - he drew laughs as he described the first meeting with his editor, who told him his book was really about "family." "I walked out of the meeting," said Mendelsohn, "and I thought, 'Why don't my dates go this well?' "

The other finalists were:

Fiction: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf); Dave Eggers, What Is the What (McSweeney's); Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf); and Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Nonfiction: Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso); Ann Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade (Penguin); Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin); Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Memoir/Autobiography: Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin); Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte); and Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Poetry: Daisy Fried, My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh Press); Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelago Books); Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); and W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism: Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within (Doubleday); Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking); and Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)

Biography: Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday); Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon & Schuster); Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown); and Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

The NBCC bestowed this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions to the world of publishing and literature on John Leonard, book critic, essayist, author, and former editor of the New York Times Book Review.

The Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Steven G. Kellman, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Read more on the winners and the other nominees, including reviews, at the book critics' Web site via http://go.philly.com/bookcircle EndText