- Categories:Awards [2]
2017 National Book Award Winners Announced [3]
- By Liz Button [4]
The
A group of judges, consisting of authors, critics, librarians, and booksellers, announced the list of five finalists per category on October 4, and longlists were announced in September. This year, three owners of ABA member bookstores served on the judging panel: for fiction, Annie Philbrick, owner of Bank Square Books [8] in Mystic, Connecticut, and Savoy Bookshop & Café in Westerly, Rhode Island; for nonfiction, Steve Bercu, CEO and owner of BookPeople [9]in Austin, Texas; and for young people’s literature, Suzanna Hermans, co-owner of Oblong Books & Music [10], with locations in Rhinebeck and Millerton, New York.
The winners of the 68th annual awards are:
Fiction: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
Nonfiction: The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (Riverhead)
Young People’s Literature: Far From the Tree by Robin Benway (HarperTeen)
Poetry: Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 by Frank Bidart (FSG) This year, winners in three of the four categories — fiction, nonfiction, and young people’s literature — were women. This is Ward’s second National Book Award; she won the fiction award in 2011 for Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA), which was a September 2011 Indie Next List [11] pick. Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing was also a
Publishers submitted 1,529 books for this year’s awards: 394 in fiction, 553 in nonfiction, 337 in young people’s literature, and 245 in poetry. To be eligible for a 2017 National Book Award, a book must have been written by a U.S. citizen and published in the United States between December 1, 2016, and November 30, 2017. Two other awards were presented at the ceremony attended by close to 800 guests: the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters [13], which was presented by actress Anne Hathaway to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx, and the NBF’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community [14], which was presented by former President Bill Clinton to Richard Robinson, president and CEO of Scholastic.
Following Wednesday’s ceremony, the National Book Foundation flew 27 of the authors honored by this year’s awards to Florida for Miami Book Fair International, where they participated in a series of panels on Friday, November 17, and Saturday, November 18.