“Everybody can relate to what we wrote about,” Tom Kitt, the composer of “Next to Normal,” said Monday. “Even though the score is based mostly in rock, I try to write emotional music for the appropriate moment.” Brian Yorkey, who wrote the show's book and lyrics, agreed. “While I am really flattered when people say we have changed the form of musicals, I don't know if that is true. Certainly, the show is adventurous,” Yorkey said. “But, ironically, the other side is that this is a show about real people and what they are going through, exploring their pains and also their joys on a level that musicals don't often do.”
Paul Harding's “Tinkers,” a debut novel released by the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, was the surprise fiction winner. Harding, who writes of an old New Englander looking back on his life, is the former drummer of Cold Water Flat, and started the book a decade ago while the band was on hiatus.
“I worked on it for five to six years and actually tried to have it published, but couldn't find an agent or a publisher,” said Harding, who currently teaches at the University of Iowa. A narrative about a 19th-century financial lord, T.J. Stiles' “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” was the biography winner.
“I worked on my book for about seven years and I had no idea it would be so timely when it was published,” Stiles said. “I really asked about the nature of finance and the financial sector, the rise of corporations and the financial markets. I didn't just examine the life of my subject, but the underpinning of the rise of the financial sector and the corporate economy.”
Another timely book, “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy,” by David E. Hoffman, won for general nonfiction.
