Re-telling of an outlaw's life and a non-ficitional account of a slave family are the two big winners for the year 2008.

The 59th annual National Book Awards held on Wednesday saw The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family and Shadow Country walk away with the Non-fiction and Fiction Awards, respectively.

Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello, tells the story of the slave family of Sally Hemings, with whom Thomas Jefferson is said to have infamously fathered several children, a fact proven by DNA testing and which has been discussed in an earlier book by Gordon-Reed. According to a New York Times report, Gordon-Reed is the first African-American author since 1991 to win this prize.

In Shadow Country, Matthiessen, who also won the 1979 non-fiction award for The Snow Leopard, tells a re-imagined version of Everglades sugar planter and supposed killer, the legendary E. J. Watson from Shadow Country. Shadow Country is a rolled into one-volume version of Matthiessen trilogy on the Florida sugarcane planter and serial killer.

Judith Blundell's What I Saw and How I Lied for Young People's Literature describes as a classic noir that takes us into 'the elusive and shady realms of adolescence' and Mark Doty's Fire to Fire for Poetry that the judges describes as 'gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion', also won.

The $10,000 prize money award presented to each winner and second only to the Pulitzer Prize are open only to American citizens.

At the black-tie ceremony, the Academy Awards of the book world, host actor / writer Eric Bogosian congratulated President-elect Barack Obama, describing him as reader and writer, quipping that just spending one-one-hundredth of what America spends in Iraq , could build a library next to every Starbucks in America .

Memoirist and novelist - Maxine Hong Kingston, a daughter of Chinese immigrants was presented with The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the award ceremony. Her 1975 book The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts went a long way in paving the way for immigrant and first-generation American writers like Cristina Garcia, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz.

Publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press and The Evergreen Review, who championed writers like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Jack Kerouac early in their careers and won two legal battles over his right to publish banned books by D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (in 1959) and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (in 1961), was presented with The Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

Rosset, 86, praised Obama in his acceptance speech and called him a 'dynamic leader' smiling proclaiming: 'For the first time in recent memory, I am not thinking of renouncing my American passport.'

Visit www. nationalbook. org for more details on the awards.