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, 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.
