National Book Award Winners Announced
A “who’s who” of the book industry convened in the Big Apple last month to mingle as the annual National Book Awards were bestowed on this year’s batch of winning authors.
The black-tie affair, the award’s 57th ceremony, took place at New York’s Marriott Marquis on Nov. 15. This year, the judges chose from 1,259 books submitted by publishers for what has become a leading literary prize for Americans since it was first given in 1950.
Richard Powers’ “The Echo Maker,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, earned the top award for fiction this year, while Timothy Egan took home the nonfiction award for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl,” published by Houghton Mifflin. Nathaniel Mackey’s “Splay Anthem,” published by New Directions, won the poetry award, M.T. Anderson’s “Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party,” published by Candlewick Press, won for Young People’s Literature.
The National Book Foundation, the nonprofit literary foundation that manages the awards, provided the winners with $10,000 prize and statuettes.
“I think that any industry needs a standard to show that quality work is being done by those who produce its products, in this case, the writers,” Harold Augenbraum, National Book Foundation executive director, told Book Business EXTRA! when the nominations were announced in October. “I think people will lose interest in an entire industry unless they believe that quality work is being done.”