Western Writers of America announces 2021 Spur Award winners

ENCAMPMENT, Wyo., March 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Robert M. Utley, the 91-year-old "Dean of Western History," and David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, are among the 2021 Spur Award winners, Western Writers of America has announced.

Utley's The Last Sovereigns: Sitting Bull and the Resistance of the Free Lakotas, published by the University of Nebraska Press, won for Best Historical Nonfiction. Weiden's Winter Counts (Echo/HarperCollins) won Spurs for Best Contemporary Novel and Best First Novel.

Winners and finalists are scheduled to be honored June 16-19 at WWA's convention in Loveland, Colo.

WWA promotes and honors the best in Western literature with the annual Spur Awards, selected by panels of judges. Awards, for material published last year, are given for works whose inspiration, image and literary excellence best represent the reality and spirit of the American West.

Johnny D. Boggs expanded his record-holding Spur total to nine by winning in the Best Original Mass-Market Paperback category for A Thousand Texas Longhorns (Pinnacle/Kensington), and bestselling historian Peter Cozzens earned his first Spur for the biography Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation (Alfred A. Knopf).

Other winners:

Contemporary Nonfiction: Justin Farrell's Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West (Princeton University Press).

First Nonfiction Book: Laura J. Arata's Race and the Wild West: Sarah Bickford, the Montana Vigilantes, and the Tourism of Decline, 1870–1930 (University of Oklahoma Press).

Historical Novel: James Wade's All Things Left Wild (Blackstone).

Romance Novel: Tom Lowe's Midnight's Whisperer (Kingsbridge).

Traditional Novel: Tyler Enfield's Like Rum-Drunk Angels (Goose Lane).

Juvenile Fiction: Matthew P. Mayo's Dilly (Five Star).

Short Nonfiction: Ted Franklin Belue's "Daniel Boone's Life in the Far West: An Inquiry into his Alleged Yellowstone Hunt" (Muzzleloader).

Short Fiction: Kevin Wolf's "Belthanger" (Western Fictioneers).

Storyteller/Illustrated Children's Book: author Cami Carlson and illustrator Greg White's Run, Cow, Run! (Kindle Direct).

Poem: Patricia Frolander's "Baptism" (High Plains Press).

Song: Randy Huston and Jim Jones's "Don't Say Goodbye to the Cowboy Way" (Dr. Vet Music/East Mountain Music), from The Cowboy Way's CD Doin' What We Do.

Documentary Script: Paul Zalis's Charlie Russell's Old West (Montana PBS).

No awards were given for juvenile nonfiction and drama scripts. Log on to WesternWriters.org for winners and finalists.

SOURCE Western Writers of America

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