A 30-year-old soldier from Iraq, Colby Buzzell, has been awarded the Blooker prize for his blog which chronicled daily life as a frontline soldier in Iraq. From The Times (UK):

A grunt’s eye view of the war in Iraq has won the world’s only prize for blogs that have been turned into books.

My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell today beat 110 entries from 15 countries to claim the £5,000 2007 Blooker Prize, sponsored by Lulu, the self-publishing website.

The former US Army machine gunner’s visceral account of his experiences battling insurgents and, much more often, boredom in the Sunni Triangle has received extensive critical acclaim.

The late Kurt Vonnegut, Buzzell’s idol and the author of one of the twentieth century’s most abiding portraits of war in Slaughterhouse Five, wrote him a fan postcard before he died last month.

Reviews have compared My War to the classics Catch 22, M*A*S*H and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.

Arianna Huffington, one of the judges and the proprietor of the influential blog Huffington Post, said: “Buzzell never takes the easy route of painting Iraq in black and white tones. His account gives flesh-and-blood — and anger, scorn, bile, and unexpected humour — to the Iraq debacle. His delightfully profane account loses nothing in the transformation from blog to blook.â€? [full text]

Unfortunately, as noted by David’s previous post, soldier blogging is now being heavily restricted by the US Army.