The digital print-on-demand service Lulu.com announced yesterday that Colby Buzzell, a former U.S. machine-gunner in post-invasion Iraq, has won the Lulu Blooker Prize for his memoir My War: Killing Time in Iraq (Putnam, 2005). The annual prize, given for "blooks"—books based on blogs or other Web sites—is worth $10,000. The judges for this year's Blooker were Nick Cohen, Rohit Gupta, Arianna Huffington, Paul Jones, and Julie Powell, the winner of last year's award for Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (Little, Brown, 2005).
Buzzell, who lives in Los Angeles, posted entries on his blog, cbftw.blogspot.com [2], during his tour of duty in Iraq. My War, which was born from that blog, was hailed by Esquire as "the most extraordinary writing yet produced by a soldier of the Iraq war."
The winner of this year's Blooker Prize for Fiction is Andrew Losowsky for The Doorbells of Florence (Prandial Publishing, 2006). He received $5,000.