Awards: Borders Original Voices

The awards honor "emerging and innovative" authors and musicians. Winners receive $5,000. Borders store employees and corporate office employees made nominations; winners were selected by a panel at the corporate office. The following were the four book winners of the 2006 Borders Original Voices Awards, with comments from the selection committee:

Fiction: The Brief History of the Dead (Knopf). "A powerful first novel. The language was poetic and the intertwining stories were the most lyrical accounts of death ever read."

Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin). An "extraordinary story of the 1935 Dust Bowl."

Children's picture book: Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser (HarperCollins). "A cute, playful story with a lot of colorful vocabulary making it fun to read aloud. It's the perfect book for parents and grandparents to read to the aspiring princess in their lives."

Young adult: Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock (Houghton Mifflin). A novel about "a young girl learning to be comfortable with herself while juggling caring for her uncommunicative family, boys and sports."