Booksellers often say that the Booker has more credibility with American readers than the NBA, citing a track record that includes Yann Martel's "Life of Pi," Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall," Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" and A.S. Byatt's "Possession" as titles introduced to an enthusiastic stateside readership during the prize's 43-year history. Chosen by a panel with varied backgrounds (scholars, novelists, critics, booksellers and the occasional broadcaster), the Booker shortlist tends to be a blend of acclaimed and relatively undiscovered works that many Britons (and quite a few Americans) make a habit of reading in its entirety.

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Over the next day or two, expect to see observers pointing out the absence of two widely praised fall novels -- "The Art of Fielding" by Chad Harbach and "The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides -- and the fact that four of the five shortlisted titles are by women. (Those with longer memories will hearken back to the much-discussed all-female short list of 2004.) However, two prominent new novels by women, Ann Patchett's "State of Wonder" and Amy Waldman's "The Submission," were passed over, as well.

Although the judges for the NBAs change every year, the sense that the fiction jury is locked in a frustrating impasse with the press and the public is eternal. (One notable recent exception: the selection of Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin" as the winner two years ago.) The press, assuming that the amount of media coverage a novel gets is a reliable indicator of its merit, expresses bafflement. The judges, if they respond at all, defend their choices as simply the best books submitted.

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The Swedish Academy said it recognized the 80-year-old poet "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

In 1990, Transtromer suffered a stroke, which left him half-paralyzed and unable to speak, but he continued to write and published a collection of poems -- "The Great Enigma" -- in 2004.

Transtromer has been a perennial favorite for the 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award, and in recent years Swedish journalists have waited outside his apartment in Stockholm on the day the literature prize was announced.

Transtromer's most famous works include the 1966 "Windows and Stones," in which he depicts themes from his many travels and "Baltics" from 1974.

His works have been translated into more than 50 languages and influenced poets around the globe, particularly in North America.

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It took Callil a few days to present a fuller explanation. In the meantime, it was fascinating to watch various commenters respond to the kerfuffle. "I'm discouraged by what I assume is her ideologically inspired illiteracy," Wendy Kaminer assumed for the Atlantic Online. "Is there a terrible scar of monotonous male sexuality in these inventions that limits their power or makes Roth deserve Callil's dismissal?" fulminated Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. "To claim that," he went on, "is to misunderstand what a novel is." Eileen Battersby, in the Irish Times, sniffed, "The sexism and ego of Roth can certainly offend, and obviously bothers the irate Booker judge Carmen Callil."

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JOURNALISM

Public service: The Los Angeles Times for its exposure of corruption in the small California city of Bell, where officials tapped the treasury to pay themselves exorbitant salaries, resulting in arrests and reforms. Finalists: Bloomberg News for the work of Daniel Golden, John Hechinger and John Lauerman revealing how some for-profit colleges exploited low-income students, leading to a federal crackdown on a multi-billion-dollar industry; and The New York Times for the work of Alan Schwarz in illuminating the peril of concussions in football and other sports, spurring a national discussion and a re-examination of helmets and of medical and coaching practices.

Breaking news reporting: No award. Finalists: Chicago Tribune staff for coverage of the deaths of two Chicago firefighters killed while searching for squatters in an abandoned burning building; The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, a joint staff entry, for coverage of the Haitian earthquake, often working under extreme conditions; and the Staff of The Tennessean, Nashville, for coverage of the most devastating flood in the area's history.

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The Literary Review has admitted from the start that getting publicity for its journal is the motivation for the event. The Review's co-founder, the late Auberon Waugh, said that originally he wanted to single out the best sex scene from the year's crop of fiction but his fellow co-founder, Rachel Koenig, deemed this concept "too boring." Koenig also told the Independent that Waugh had become tired of the whole thing shortly before he died in 2001, and herself referred to the award as "a pretty old T-shirt."

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Two authors recently wrote to the National Book Foundation, asking the organization to reconsider its exclusion of retold fairy and folk tales from NBA consideration. (The rule applies to both the "fiction" and the "young people's literature" categories.) Maria Tatar is a professor of folklore, mythology and Germanic languages and literature at Harvard, and Kate Bernheimer is the founder and editor of the Fairy Tale Review, a literary journal, and editor of a sumptuous new book of short stories based on fairy tales, "My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me." Contributors to that anthology -- which wouldn't be eligible to begin with, on account of containing "work written by multiple authors" -- include Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman and Michael Cunningham, and as the title suggests, we're talking about the unexpurgated, frequently gruesome, old-school-style fairy tales, not the sanitized Disney versions.

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Although strong positions on Israel, Zionism and anti-Semitism comprise the bulk of this talky book, they are expressed through characters who each, eventually, change their minds. More impressively, behind these characters it is impossible to find any puppet master. You cannot deduce an authorial stance, only evidence of a frighteningly smart and insightful thinker and stylist. Jacobson -- an established British author who has been terribly under-known this side of the pond -- has written a brave book. Even more welcome, he has written a seriously funny one.

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That's the Booker in a nutshell, a British prize that generates tabloidish buzz in the U.K. (they even broadcast the ceremony on TV) and commands a surprising amount of sales clout on this side of the pond. "C" has divided critics and readers; McCarthy is a one-man campaign for the revival of the nouveau roman, the strain of European experimental fiction pioneered by such writers as Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain Robbe-Grillet. People either love that idea, or really, really hate it, and despite all those dicey-looking, 11th-hour bets, it seems there just weren't enough lovers of high modernism on this year's jury.

"The Finkler Question," on the other hand, ruminates on the nature of British Judaism. Its author, despite having two previous novels on the Booker long list, has complained in the press that comic novels like his aren't taken seriously enough. He's got a point, but as someone who couldn't make it through "The Finkler Question," I'd suggest that this isn't necessarily due to what Jacobson has termed "a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness."

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In fact, it's a banner year for Jackson's legacy: the Library of America has just published "Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories," edited by Joyce Carol Oates and containing 47 short stories in addition to her two most celebrated novels, "The Haunting of Hill House" and "We Have Always Lived in the Castle." Yet these laurels were tarnished a bit in April, when Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones used the publication of the Jackson volume as the occasion for an essay asking whether the LOA was running out of important writers to publish. "Shirley Jackson?" he wrote. "A writer mostly famous for one short story, 'The Lottery.' Is LOA about to jump the shark?"

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J.G. Farrell's "Troubles" was awarded the "lost" Booker Prize for works published in 1970, a year when no prize was handed out. Set in 1919, the novel is about an English army officer ensconced in a crumbling Irish hotel, scarcely aware of the war for independence breaking out around him.

Farrell was chosen over five other finalists: Patrick White's "The Vivisector," Mary Renault's "Fire From Heaven," Nina Bawden's "The Birds on the Trees," Shirley Hazzard's "The Bay of Noon" and Muriel Spark's "The Driver's Seat."

Farrell, who drowned while fishing on the Irish coast in 1979, also won the Booker in 1973 for "The Siege of Krishnapur." Those two novels -- along with a later book, "The Singapore Grip" -- form a trilogy exploring the end of the British Empire.

Television news anchor Katie Derham, one of three judges who chose the finalists, said the prize should bring a new generation of readers to the author, whose reputation has faded since his death at 44.

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The Washington Post's award for international reporting went to Anthony Shadid for what the Pulitzer board called "his rich, beautifully written series" on Iraq as the U.S. military gets ready to withdraw. The newspaper's Gene Weingarten won in feature writing for a piece on parents who accidentally kill their children by leaving them in cars.

The Post also won in commentary for Kathleen Parker's witty columns on political and moral issues, and in criticism, for Sarah Kaufman's writing on dance.

The New York Times won for national reporting for a series of stories in print and online on distracted driving, and for explanatory reporting for exposing defects in federal food-safety regulations.

ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative-journalism service, won one of two Pulitzers awarded for investigative reporting for a story on the life-and-death decisions made by doctors at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. The story was a collaboration with The New York Times Magazine.

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Reid's "A Scattering" -- inspired by his wife's death from cancer in 2005 -- beat four other finalists to the 30,000 pound ($48,426) prize, which aims to reward the most enjoyable book in the last year by writers based in the U.K. and Ireland.

"I'm delighted and bewildered to be the recipient of this important literary prize," the 60-year-old said as he accepted the award in central London. "The book itself was difficult to write ... It hasn't quietened the grief but it's helped me think more clearly."

Judge Josephine Hart described Reid's winning collection as "austere and beautiful and moving." She compared Reid's work to those by Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats, who were both inspired to write by personal tragedy.

"We feel that what Christopher Reid did was to take a personal tragedy and to make the emotion and the situation universal," she said. "It is bizarrely life-enhancing because it speaks of the triumph of love before and after death."

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Stead's intricate, time-traveling narrative set in 1970s Manhattan, which was inspired in part by Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," won the John Newbery Medal for best children's book. The Randolph Caldecott prize for picture books was given to Pinkney's wordless telling of the classic Aesop fable.

The awards were announced Monday in Boston at the American Library Association's annual midwinter meeting.

The Newbery and Caldecott, both founded decades ago, bring prestige and the hope of higher sales to children's authors. Previous winners such as "A Wrinkle in Time" and Louis Sachar's "Holes" have become standards, but more recent picks have been criticized by librarians as being too difficult ("Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village," by Laura Amy Schlitz) or for having inappropriate content (Susan Patron's "The Higher Power of Lucky").

This year's winners were considered leading contenders.

Stead's book, the adventures of a sixth-grader named Miranda, was praised by The New York Times as a "taut novel," in which "every word, every sentence, has meaning and substance."

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Literary awards are more than just ego boosts these days. As the critic James Wood observed a few years back, "prizes are the new reviews," the means by which many people now decide which books to buy, when they bother to buy books at all. There are some 400,000 titles published per year in the U.S. alone -- one new book every minute and a half -- according to Bowker, a company providing information services to the industry, and there are fewer people with the time and inclination to read them. If you only read, for example, about five novels per year (a near-heroic feat of literacy for the average American), you could limit yourself to just the winners of the NBA, the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle, the Booker Prize and then, oh, a Hugo or Edgar winner -- or even a backlist title by that year's Nobel Prize winner. You'd never have to lower your sights to anything unlaureled by a major award.

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