King gets honorary medal, but he also has detractors

NEW YORK — Weakened by pneumonia, still limping from a 1999 road accident, Stephen King received a long, standing ovation as he approached the stage to accept an honorary National Book Award.

But not everyone cheered his acceptance speech Wednesday night, including fiction winner Shirley Hazzard, whose novel "The Great Fire," a sophisticated romantic tale set just after World War II, took the fiction prize.

The 56-year-old King, whose many best sellers include "Carrie" and "The Shining," acknowledged that some thought him unworthy of a prize previously won by Philip Roth and Arthur Miller among others. But his call for publishing people to spend more time reading writers like himself was rejected by Hazzard, a proudly old-fashioned literary author.

"I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction," said the petite, 72-year-old Hazzard, who writes in longhand on yellow legal pads and took more than a decade to complete her winning novel.

Other winners Wednesday included Carlos Eire, who received the nonfiction prize for "Waiting for Snow in Havana"; Polly Horvath, winner in the young people's category for "The Canning Season," and C.K. Williams, the poetry winner for "The Singing."

Each received $10,000. Finalists got $1,000.

The National Book Awards are both a dress-up time for the publishing industry, with a red carpet laid outside, and a fund-raiser for the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization that charged $1,000 a seat.

For the most part, it was King's kind of crowd. At $12,000 a table, the horror author had bought up five, and several of the night's nominees praised him as a gifted storyteller and a friend to fellow writers.

"He is one of the sweethearts of literature," fiction finalist T. Coraghessan Boyle told The Associated Press. "He has done so much for other writers."

King's speech was humorous, sentimental and defiant. He remembered his early years of writing, the typewriter sandwiched in the laundry room between the washer and dryer. He said he had been ready to give up on "Carrie," now a modern horror classic, only to be talked out of it by his wife, Tabitha.

He also urged the book foundation not to make his award a case of "tokenism," an isolated tribute to commercially successfully writers. And he called on the industry as a whole to pay more attention, saying he had no "use for those who make a point of pride in saying they have never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer."