The winners of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America and "honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television and film published or produced in 2006," are:
- Best Novel: The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin (FSG)
- Best First Novel by an American Author: The Faithful Spy by Alex Berenson (Random House)
- Best Paperback Original: Snakeskin Shamisen by Naomi Hirahara (Delta)
- Best Fact Crime: Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson (Morrow)
- Best Critical/Biographical: The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear by E.J. Wagner (Wiley)
- Best Short Story: "The Home Front" in Death Do Us Part by Charles Ardai (Little, Brown)
- Best Juvenile: Room One: A Mystery or Two by Andrew Clements (S&S Books for Young Readers)
- Best Young Adult: Buried by Robin Merrow MacCready (Dutton Children's Books)
- Best Play: Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure by Steven Dietz (Arizona Theatre Company)
- Best Television Episode Teleplay: Life on Mars, Episode 1, by Matthew Graham (BBC America)
- Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay: The Wire, Season 4, teleplays by Ed Burns, Kia Corthron, Dennis Lehane, David Mills, Eric Overmyer, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon and William F. Zorzi (HBO)
- Best Motion Picture Screenplay: The Departed by William Monahan (Warner Bros.)
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The winners of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, announced at the beginning of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, are:
- Fiction: A.B. Yehoshua for A Woman in Jerusalem translated by Hillel Halkin (Harcourt)
- History: Lawrence Wright for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf)
- Biography: Neal Gabler for Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf)
- Current interest: Ian Buruma for Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin)
- Mystery/thriller: Michael Connelly for Echo Park (Little, Brown)
- The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Alice Greenway for White Ghost Girls (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)
- Young Adult Fiction: Coe Booth for Tyrell (Push/Scholastic)
- Science and Technology: Eric R. Kandel for In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (Norton)
- Poetry: Frederick Seidel for Ooga-Booga (FSG)
Each prize includes a $1,000 cash award.
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The Boys from Siam by John Austin Connolly has won the first
Yale Drama Series competition, a new annual award for emerging
playwrights in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland. The winner of
the prize, sponsored by Yale University Press and Yale Repertory
Theatre and funded by the David Charles Horn Foundation, receives
$10,000, a staged reading at the Theatre and publication by the press.
Edward Albee chose the winner from 500 submissions. The Secret Agenda of Trees by Colin McKenna and Open Rehearsal by Lazarre Seymour Simckes were runners up.
The Boys from Siam is based loosely on the lives of Chang and
Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the twins from Siam, now called Thailand, joined at the sternum who
gave rise to the phrase "Siamese twins." Much of the play takes place
on the day the twins died. Connolly is a retired clinical psychologist
who lives in Dublin.