A retired radio announcer has won a prestigious international award for his writing at the London Book Fair. Walnut resident Doug Wesselmann once wrote scripts for an Omaha rock station’s fantasy adventure, “Space Commander Wack, Space Commander.”Wesselman was known on the radio as “Otis Twelve,” for most of his 25 years as a broadcaster. He says the skills didn’t all come naturally, at least until he attended a Kansas school taught by Benedictine nuns. He learned to talk as a child in Philadelphia, moved to Kansas City and spoke like “a doity boid” from the city, but says the nuns sent him to a speech pathologist and “they basically beat it out of me and then I became a Midwesterner.” Wesselman says his career in communication was always grounded in writing. In radio and TV, he wrote movie reviews, advertising, and says “You know how that works — I was writing for thirty years. It was just… that I decided to try to write novels.” So he left his radio work and has spent recent months writing a novel, at his home in the small town of Walnut. The title’s “On the Albino Farm,” and Wesselman says the plot’s about “a sociopath who manipulates a psychopath to kill a pedophile.” At one of the biggest literature events of the year, the London Book Fair, a combination of literary critics, readers and Internet supporters voted Wesselman the winner of the Lit-Idol award, a takeoff on the “American Idol” talent show. He wins a real prize, a contract with an agent who’s said he’s likely to have success getting the book printed by a major publisher. Wesselmann’s already at work on a sequel to be titled “Sometimes a Prozac Nition.” Wesselman was also a member of a rock group in the 1970s that performed in concert for years and recorded a cult classic song called “Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun.”