Writer

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Find an empty seat in the press box next to his in the summer or an empty bar stool at Frenchy's in Clearwater in March and he'll tell you stories. They'll be the most engaging baseball stories you're ever likely to hear and you'll be entertained for hours on end. That's what Paul Hagen is at heart: a storyteller. On Tuesday at the Opryland Hotel, Hagen briefly told the stories about the two times he stood at the podium at Cooperstown at the National Baseball Hall of Fame to introduce honorees.

Alan S. Oser, 81, the New York Times' authoritative voice in real estate coverage for more than 30 years as a writer and editor, died Tuesday in Barcelona, Spain, where he was celebrating his 60th wedding anniversary with his wife, Janice. The cause was a stroke, said his son, Roy. From 1969 through 2004, several years past his nominal retirement, Mr. Oser wrote about real estate in the daily Times and in the Sunday Real Estate section. In 2004, Mr. Oser, a violinist, founded New Paths in Music, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that presents the work of foreign composers whose music has rarely if ever been performed in this country.

Boris N. Strugatsky, 79, a prolific writer who used the genre of science fiction to voice criticisms of Soviet life that would have been unthinkable in other literary forms, died Nov. 19 in St. Petersburg. The cause was heart failure, his biographer, Boris Vishnevsky, said. Employed as an astronomer at a state observatory, Mr. Strugatsky began collaborating on science fiction with his older brother, Arkady, in 1956. Together they produced rich, often bleak allegorical landscapes that ranged from a dysfunctional institute for the research of magic in Mondays Begin on Saturday to a postapocalyptic "zone" littered with deadly extraterrestrial objects in Roadside Picnic , adapted for Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's revered 1979 film.

NEW YORK - The National Book Awards on Wednesday honored longtime writers and new authors, from Louise Erdrich for The Round House to Katherine Boo for her debut work, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. Erdrich, 58, has been a published and highly regarded author for nearly 30 years but had never won a National Book Award until being cited Wednesday for her story about an Ojibwe boy and his quest to avenge his mother's rape. A clearly delighted and surprised Erdrich, who's part Ojibwe, spoke in her tribal tongue and then switched to English as she dedicated her fiction award to "the grace and endurance of native people.

'If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. " That, says Elmore Leonard, is the rule that sums up his famous "Ten Rules of Writing," a sort of manifesto in miniature on behalf of the plain style (sample: "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip"). Leonard has written 45 novels, starting with The Bounty Hunters in 1953. About half of them have made it to the New York Times' best-seller list, including his latest, Raylan . Seventeen have been made into films, sometimes more than once, most notably 3:10 to Yuma (two versions)

John Hawkes had two concerns when he was considering the role of Mark O'Brien , the real-life journalist and poet who was paralyzed from the neck down - a childhood victim of polio - and who decided, at age 38, to hire a sex surrogate so he could lose his virginity. The first concern: why not a disabled actor? It was a question Hawkes posed to Ben Lewin , the writer and director, when they first met. "Ben is a polio survivor himself," says Hawkes, who was nominated for a supporting actor Academy Award for his turn as Teardrop, the Ozarks meth dealer, in 2010's Winter's Bone - and who could well be nominated in the lead actor category for his staggering and sweet portrayal of O'Brien in Lewis' movie, The Sessions . Lewin told Hawkes that he had searched and tested some "terrific" disabled actors, and he planned to put some of them in the film.

  One of Leonard Boasberg's last opinion pieces for The Inquirer's editorial pages, published Sept. 23, 2011, was headlined, "Nutty historical revisionism on the right. " Mr. Boasberg wrote: "Where do these Republican politicians get their nutty notions? Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida . . . recently contended that Social Security and Medicare have 'weakened us as a people.' " After noting what Rubio said, Mr. Boasberg continued, tongue in cheek: "Ah, the good old days, when people took care of their families and neighbors and more than half of our old people lived in poverty.

LONDON - British writer Hilary Mantel has won the prestigious Booker literary prize for a second time with her blood-soaked Tudor saga Bring Up the Bodies . Mantel, who took the £50,000 ($82,000) award in 2009 for Wolf Hall , is the first British author, and the first woman, to achieve a Booker double, joining double winners Peter Carey of Australia and J.M. Coetzee of South Africa. "You wait 20 years for a Booker Prize, and two come along at once," Mantel said as she accepted the award at London's medieval Guildhall on Tuesday night.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Chinese writer Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday, a cause of pride for a government that had disowned the only previous Chinese winner of the award, an exiled critic. National television broke into its newscast to announce the prize - exceptional for the tightly scripted broadcast that usually focuses on the doings of Chinese leaders. The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners, praised Mo's "hallucinatory realism" saying it "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.