The 2004 National Book Awards turned out to produce a healthy controversy, healthy for readers and maybe even for the publishing industry.

The prizes were announced Wednesday in New York.

The winners in the two disputed categories -- fiction and nonfiction -- turned out to be more mainstream than anticipated.

Lily Tuck, an established novelist, won for "The News From Paraguay." Her competition was four relatively unknown writers -- Joan Silber, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Kate Walbert and Christine Schutt.

There was much grousing from establishment quarters that the fiction judges, headed by novelist Rick Moody and including Pittsburgh writer Stewart O'Nan, were literary snobs who were out to make a rebellious statement in their nominations.

"This is not a popularity contest," O'Nan told me last month when I brought the subject up.

Kevin Boyle, Ohio State University history professor, won the nonfiction award for "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age."

Among his competitors was the report of the 9/11 Commission, another disputed nomination because it was written by committee and funded by the federal government.

Jean Valentine won the poetry award, a prize well deserved for this dedicated and beloved poet who was a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh last year.

Her book is "Door In The Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003."

Pitt poet and professor Lynn Emanuel was on the poetry committee and wrote Valentine's citation.

"Jean Valentine's poems are lyrical, formally inventive, and politically alert," Emanuel wrote.

"Jean Valentine sounds like no one else, and her poetry is, as the Japanese would describe it, a national treasure."

Pete Hautman's young adult novel, "Godless," was the children's book winner. Hautman also writes mysteries for adults.

Back to the controversies. Administering the book awards is the National Book Foundation, an organization founded in 1989 to promote reading and writing and insulate the prizes from the influences of the publishing industry.

The honors have been around since 1950 and were sponsored in part by publishers who still buy most of the $1,000-a-plate dinners at the ceremony.

They were all smiles last year when rainmaker Stephen King accepted the foundation's honorary medal for distinguished contributions to American letters.

They were frowning this year when the fiction finalists were announced. Only one of them had written a book that sold more than 2,000 copies.

Was this payback from the literary community for King's recognition?

Speaking at the ceremony, Moody addressed the issue squarely:

"We believe that excellence is twofold. It inheres in language, and it inheres in imagination."

He said the five authors engaged in "writing that extends the life of the American tongue."

Moody didn't mention plot or character development, two elements that most readers find necessary in a novel.

Yet, without language and imagination, fiction has no life.

While this controversy will probably have no impact on changing mainstream American fiction, it does briefly shine some light on the wide range of authors trying their luck in the marketplace.

(I also suspect it offers some encouragement to all of those students in creative writing programs.)

Tuck also will sell a few more books, as will her competitors -- nothing to make King quake in his L.L. Bean slippers but enough, perhaps, to make a dent in the publishers' overstocks.

More honors

Carnegie Mellon University professors Jim Daniels and Terrance Hayes both won $20,000 Creative Writing Fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for The Arts this year.

Daniels is director of CMU's Creative Writing Program, while Hayes is an associate professor in the program.

Daniels has published eight poetry collections and two collections of short stories.

Hayes has written two collections. One of them, "Hip Logic," was a National Poetry Series Winner.

It's the second time two CMU writers won the fellowships in the same year. In 2000, prose writers Jane Bernstein and Sharon Dilworth were awardees.