This year’s National Book Awards were dominated by women. Female writers took home prizes in three major categories: fiction, nonfiction, and young people’s literature. An event celebrating the winners was held last night in New York City, The New York Times reports.
Novelist Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Fiction for “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” Set in contemporary Mississippi, the family epic “grapples with race, poverty, and the psychic scars of past violence,” the source summarizes. The story centers on a 13-year-old boy on a road trip with his sister and drug-addicted mother. Described by judges as “a narrative so beautifully taut and heartbreakingly eloquent that it stops the breath,” the book has earned comparisons to Toni Morrison and William Faulkner’s works. Ward previously took home the National Book Award for Fiction for “Salvage the Bones” in 2011. She’s the first woman to ever receive the honor twice.
“Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories,” Ward revealed in her acceptance speech. “I don’t know whether some doorkeepers felt this way because I wrote about poor people or because I wrote about black people or because I wrote about Southerners … [But] you looked at me, at the people I love and write about, you looked at my poor, my black, my Southern children, women, and men — and you saw yourself. You saw your grief, your love, your losses, your regrets, your joy, your hope.”
The nonfiction prize went to Masha Gessen for “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which “chronicles the return of authoritarianism under Vladimir V. Putin through the lives of four Russians born in the 1980s.”
Robin Benway’s coming-of-age novel “Far From the Tree” received the award for young people’s literature. The book centers on an adopted only child who is reunited with her biological siblings.
Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx was awarded the foundation’s medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. The “Brokeback Mountain” and “Shipping News” author was presented the award by Anne Hathaway, who starred in the Oscar-winning film adaptation of the former. “We are richer because of the deceptively simple, precise, devastating poetry of Ms. Proulx,” Hathaway said.
Women made up “15 of the 20 finalists in four categories,” the Times writes. “Four out of five fiction finalists were women: …. Min Jin Lee’s novel ‘Pachinko,’ Lisa Ko’s debut novel ‘The Leavers,’ [and] Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection ‘Her Body and Other Parties.’”
