Congratulations to Ariel Sabar, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who has won the 2008 autobiography prize from the National Book Critics Circle for My Father's Paradise. Sabar wrote about his relationship with his father, who grew up in a mud hut in Kurdish Iraq, emigrated to Israel with thousands of other Jews and wound up as a professor of Aramaic at UCLA. My book club really liked the book, which has since been chosen for Baltimore's On the Same Page program. As part of that community reading program, Sabar will appear May 7 at the Center for Jewish Education on Park Heights Ave. Info: 410-735-5000

Here are the other NBCC winners, announced last night, according to Reuters.

Fiction: 2666 by Roberto Bolano.

Nonfiction: The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

Biography: The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French

Poetry: Sleeping it off in Rapid City by August Kleinzahler and Half of the World in Light by Juan Felipe Herrera

Criticism: Children Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer