Joan Didion is the 2005 winner for the National Book Award in Nonfiction for The Year of Magical Thinking. She has been a novelist, essayist and screenwriter for more than three decades and was awarded the 1996 Edward MacDowell Medal and the 1999 Columbia Journalism Award. In May 2005 she received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is the highest honor the Academy awards to a writer, once every six years. Ms. Didion currently lives in New York and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.

W.S. Merwin won the 2005 National Book Awards in Poetry for Migration: New and Selected Poems. Born in New York City in 1927, he worked from 1949 to 1951 as a tutor in France, Mallorca, and Portugal; for several years afterward he made his living by translating from French, Spanish, Latin, and Portuguese. His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry, the Bollingen Award, the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of dozens of books of poetry and prose; his most recent volume of poems is Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2005). For the past thirty years he has lived in Hawaii.