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Young Kwak

Bruce Holbert's Western-themed historical fiction took home top honors.

In case you missed the announcement, the 2015 Washington State Book Awards were presented in Seattle last Saturday night, with two out of the four Spokane-area writers nominated for this year's prize taking home honors.

Winning the fiction category's top honors is Mt. Spokane High School teacher Bruce Holbert for his second novel The Hour of Lead (here's our profile on Holbert from last fall). 

Gonzaga creative writing professor Tod Marshall also nabbed the poetry category award for his collection Bugle, alongside Red Pine's translation of The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse.

Both Holbert and Marshall are first-time state Book Award winners, though Marshall was also a finalist back in 2010 for his poetry collection Tangled Lines.

This year's two other Spokane nominees included Greg Gordon for his nonfiction account When Money Grew on Trees: A. B. Hammond and the Age of the Timber Baron, and Mary Cronk Farrell, nominated in the young adult category for her book Pure Grit: How American World War II Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific.

The Washington State Book Awards are presented by the Washington Center for the Book, a program of the Seattle Public Library with a mission to encourage the exchange of ideas evoked by literature and the humanities. It was established in 1989, and the Washington State Book Awards have been presented since 1987. 

The deadline for nominations for next year's awards (for books published this year, 2015) is April 1, 2016.