Michael Lister's DOUBLE EXPOSURE Wins Florida Book Award

North Florida Author Michael Lister’s “Double Exposure” won a Bronze Medal for General Fiction in the 2009 Florida Book Awards.

The Florida Book Awards –the nation’s most comprehensive state book awards program– was established in 2006 to recognize, honor, and celebrate the best Florida literature published the previous year. It is coordinated by The Florida State University Libraries, and co-sponsored by the Florida Center for the Book, State Library and Archives of Florida, Florida Historical Society, Florida Humanities Council, Florida Literary Arts Coalition, Florida Library Association, “Just Read, Florida!,” Florida Family Literacy Initiative, the Program in American and Florida Studies at Florida State University, Florida Reading Association, Florida Association for Media in Education, Florida Center for the Literary Arts, the Friends of FSU Libraries, and Florida Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America.

“This is a real honor,” Lister said. “I’m a Florida writer. Florida is the landscape I’m painting with my palette of words, my actual and spiritual home, so to win a Florida Book Award is extremely gratifying. And of all my books, “Double Exposure” is the one most centered in this land. It’s my love letter to wild North Florida.”

Following his dad’s death, Remington James returns to the small North Florida town where he grew up to assume his father’s life—taking care of his dying mother and running the local gun and pawn shop.

Picking up a camera again after a long hiatus, Remington returns to his first love, pursuing in earnest his lifelong dream of becoming a wildlife photographer.

One fateful fall evening, as the sun sinks and the darkness expands, Remington ventures deep into the river swamp to try out some new equipment and check his camera traps.

Encountering the kind of wildlife that made him want to be a photographer in the first place, Remington gets some of the best shots of his life, but he’s about to happen upon the most dangerous animal of all—A feral, patient, sociopath who wants Remington dead.

While checking his camera traps, scanning the eerie images of overexposed deer and bats and foxes, Remington comes across the most haunting images of his life — the frame-by-frame capture of a shocking crime.

By exposing the criminal, Remington has exposed himself to danger, even possible extinction. Hunted like an animal, by the predator and his psychotic friends, Remington must do two things: make it through the night and make it to the river — and the odds of doing either are slim to none.

Lyrical, literary, and told in poetic photographic impressions, Double Exposure is filled with far more than just exciting adventure and suspense. It’s a meditation on life and death and art and meaning you won’t soon forget.

This is the fourth year of competitions in the Florida Book Awards, which has seven categories for books published in 2009. “The culture of books in the Sunshine State continues to prosper,” notes FBA Director Wayne A. Wiegand. “These FBA winners clearly prove it.”

Submissions were read by seven juries of three members each nominated from across the state by cosponsoring organizations. Jurors were authorized to select up to five medalists in each of the seven categories.

“From the very beginning, “Double Exposure” has been a very special book for me,” Lister said. “So many wonderful things have and continue to happen with it—from critics and readers responses to environmental education and conservation efforts to the brilliant play director Jason Hedden produced to foreign sales to feature film interest. I’m so very grateful.”

When asked why “Double Exposure” was submitted in the general instead of popular fiction category, Lister said, “It’s true, “Double Exposure” is a literary thriller that can be classified broadly as crime fiction, but my publisher and I thought that by submitting the book in the general fiction category we were letting it stand on its literary merits.”

In his introduction to “Double Exposure,” #1 New York Times Besteslling Author, Michael Connelly, calls the book “Elegiac, like a two-hundred page poem, with words that skip on the waters of the imagination like well-polished stones.”

Lister and the other winners will be recognized at a banquet during the Florida Library Association Conference Banquet on April 8 in Orlando.

For more information about Michael Lister or his books, go to www.MichaelLister.com