NEW YORK – This year's winners of the Carnegie medals for fiction and nonfiction, presented by the American Library Association, have each checked out a few books in their time. “I work from libraries a lot, and my wallet is full of library cards,” says Rebecca Giggs, an Australian author whose “Fathoms: The World in the Whale" received the nonfiction prize Thursday.
James McBride, the fiction winner for “Deacon King Kong,” has library cards in four different cities and wrote parts of his novel in branches in New York City and Philadelphia. “In New York you can get anything you want but it takes longer because you can't leave the library with them.