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AUSTIN – The Philosophical Society of Texas announced its annual Book Prizes for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry during the Society’s annual meeting held in Austin recently. The prizes announced this year were for books published in 2021 and reviewed by the Committee in 2022. The Fiction Prize was awarded posthumously to Jan Reid for his novel The Song Leader (TCU Press). The Song Leader is an epic and intimate story that ranges from West Texas to California to Vietnam to Zaire and back, about a young man in the second half of the Twentieth Century restlessly searching for his authentic self in the worlds of boxing and music. Jan Reid wrote with hard-won authority about these subjects during a long and distinguished career, and in this novel he embeds that expertise into a plaintive, deeply personal story. The result is an evocative, honestly rendered Texas novel that none of the committee members could stop thinking about.