A novel about a jet coming down in the ocean off a small Nova Scotia island has earned American author Brad Kessler a Whiting Writers' Award for emerging writers.

The New York-based Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation presented the Whiting Awards, worth $50,000 US each, to 10 writers in New York on Wednesday.

Kessler, a Vermont-based goat farmer and children's author, has written Birds in Fall, which tells the story of an ornithologist whose husband is one of the victims of an air tragedy off the coast of Nova Scotia.

The relatives of the victims gather on the island closest to the crash to play out their grief.

The plot is an echo of the 1998 Swissair crash that killed 229 people in the ocean off Peggy's Cove, N.S.

The winners of the awards for new writers of "talent and promise" included two playwrights, two poets, three non-fiction writers and three fiction writers.

The winners for fiction were Ben Fountain of Dallas, author of a collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, and Iranian-born writer Dalia Sofer, who wrote an autobiographic novel about a Jewish family in Iran after the 1979 revolution titled The Septembers of Shiraz.

The playwrights are Brooklyn's Sheila Callaghan for Lascivious Something, scheduled to open off-Broadway in 2008, and Miami-based Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose The Brothers Size will be produced at the Young Vic in London and at New York City's Public Theater.

Paul Guest, of Carrollton, Ga., author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World and Notes for My Body Double, and New York-based Cate Marvin, author of Fragment of the Head of a Queen, won the Whiting Award for their poetry.

The non-fiction winners are:

  • Peter Trachtenberg of New York, author of Seven Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, a memoir that centres on his uncomfortable relationship with God.
  • Carlo Rotella, of Brookline, Mass., author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, a collection of essays about boxing.
  • Jack Turner, who lives in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, for his memoir, Teewinot: A Year in the Teton Range.

Previous winners of the award, founded in 1985, include Pulitzer Prize winners Michael Cunningham and Jeffrey Eugenides.

With files from the Associated Press