WATERVILLE -- Native son Ron Currie Jr. has been named the winner of this year's New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award.

The $10,000 Lions purse is given annually to an American writer 35 or younger for either a novel or collection of short stories.

Currie, 32, won the award for his 2007 book "God Is Dead."

He was one of five finalists.

"It's a prestigious award, it's kind of high profile and it's the only major literary award for younger writers," Currie said Friday. "In a perfect world, it will be a big boost. I was told by the publisher the other day that they've gotten reorders of the paperback already, even though it hasn't been released -- just based on the momentum from the Young Lions Award."

In Currie's novel, God descends to Earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan who subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, according to a Public Library release.

"The result is a world both bizarrely new yet eerily familiar," the release notes. "In this wise and provocative story, we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body."

God destroys the refugee camp where the woman is living and a pack of African painted dogs eats the corpse and, in turn, are instilled with some of God's omniscience, Currie himself explains.

The word of God's death gets out -- the feral dogs now speak several languages -- and the world descends into a society of group suicides, child worship and wars based on fate and free will between godless armies, in an absurd metaphor between Islam and Christianity, he said.

And it all comes with a measure of dark humor, he said.

"The founders of this award have in the past spoken of their desire to provide ratification to young writers at the beginnings of their careers, and this, more than any financial support, is absolutely critical," Currie said in accepting the award in New York. "Simply being named as a finalist was ratification enough, and to be named the winner is just unreasonably gratifying."

A 1993 graduate of Waterville High School, Currie lives on Gold Street, in Waterville's South End neighborhood near where his father grew up.

Ron Currie Sr., a career firefighter and rescue technician with the Waterville Fire Department, died in December 2007 of cancer related to his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.

Currie Jr.'s stories have won prizes in The World's Best Short Story competition and have been short-listed for the Fish International Short Story Award and Swink Magazine's Emerging Writer Award, according to the library release.

Currie and his book have gained mention in Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Gentleman's Quarterly, Esquire and in newspapers from coast to coast as well as in Europe.

He is mentioned in a cultural column in the same edition of Vanity Fair in which the photographs of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus are published.

"It was pretty unexpected," Currie said of winning the Young Lions Award. "I was in New York for two days and I was so convinced that I didn't have a shot at actually winning the prize that I had sort of forgotten that I was up for a prize in the first place.

"So when they announced my name -- the entire evening was pretty surreal -- and that was just the cherry, it was amazing, it really was."

Doug Harlow -- 861-9244

dharlow@centralmaine.com