Five writers took home National Book Awards at Wednesday night’s ceremony in Manhattan. The honorees, whose work was selected out of more than 1,700 books submitted for consideration, were awarded last night at the event’s 70th annual celebration.
The five winners are:
Fiction: Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise
Nonfiction: Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House
Poetry: Arthur Sze’s Sight Lines
Translated literature: Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, by László Krasznahorkai and translator Ottilie Mulzet
Young people’s literature: Martin W. Sandler’s 1919: The Year That Changed America
397 in Fiction, 600 in Nonfiction, 245 in Poetry, 145 in Translated Literature, and 325 in Young People's Literature. #NBAwards
— National Book Foundation (@nationalbook) November 21, 2019
Broom attributed her success to her mother’s influence influence as she addressed the room Wednesday night. “As a child, I watched her every move, seeing her eyes fall upon every word everywhere — encountered in the grocery store, on a bus, pamphlets, the package labels, my high school textbooks,” she said, according to NPR .
“She was always wolfing down words, insatiable — which is how I learned the ways in which words were a kind of sustenance, could be a beautiful relief or a greatest assault.”
This year’s National Book Award winners were also joined by other honorees acknowledged by the National Book Foundation, including Oren J. Teicher, who won the Literarian Award for his work as the chief executive at the American Booksellers Association.
Edmund White was awarded the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the National Book Awards’ lifetime achievement award. The 79-year-old writer, whose groundbreaking work on LGBTQ matters was controversial in his early career, remarked on his rise from “the most maligned to a highly lauded writer,” calling the feat “astonishing.”
LeVar Burton, former host of Reading Rainbow, hosted. “It is the stories that we tell each other that define who we are, why we’re here, what our mission is in life,” he said. “It is storytelling that holds our civilization together.”
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