Novelist garners awards

Review by: Bill Thompson, The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC
September 5, 2010

"Dead Weight" is buoyant.

The South Carolina Center for the Book has announced that Batt Humphreys of Charleston is the 2010 recipient of its Palmetto Book Award for excellence in writing.

This is the latest literary award garnered by the debut novelist, whose "Dead Weight" is based on the true story of the State vs. Daniel Duncan. The book details the 1910 trial, conviction and execution of Daniel "Nealy" Duncan, a young black man accused of murder on the eve of his wedding.

The novel also tells a love story while weaving in a description of a hurricane that hammered Charleston after the hanging -- the Duncan Storm, as it was called, "divine wrath for the death of an innocent man."

Published locally by Joggling Board Press, "Dead Weight" was read in its entirety on National Public Radio last spring.

Its re-creation of 1910 already has earned an Independent Publisher Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award for best work of historic fiction and a medal from Foreword Magazine for best historicical fiction.

Humphreys, for 15 years a producer for CBS News in New York, will be honored Wednesday at an awards ceremony in Columbia.

The South Carolina Center for the Book is the South Carolina affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book and is a cooperative project of the South Carolina State Library, University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science and the Humanities Council.

Past winners of the Palmetto Award include Mary Alice Monroe of the Isle of Palms and Dr. Walter Edgar of USC.