Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala (Harper Perennial, $11.95, 0060798688) has won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, which is given annually to a writer 35 years old or younger. The prize carries an award of £5,000 (about $9,800). The Guardian, which reported on the prize, called the book "a brutal but surprisingly poetic novel about an African child soldier."
Iweala,
23, was born in Nigeria and raised in the U.S.; Beasts of No Nation grew out of
his senior honors dissertation at Harvard. His mother is Nigeria's
finance minister.
The book has won the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction
Award, the 2005 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for
fiction and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.