Adam Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles (Random) won the National Book Award for Fiction at a gala awards ceremony last week at Cipriani in New York City. Though fiction is usually the most-anticipated category, this year Ta-Nehisi Coates, winner of the nonfiction award for his moving memoir on race, Between the World and Me (Random/Spiegel & Grau), was the clear favorite among those in attendance; the audience responded with a roar of approval when his name was announced as the nonfiction winner. The other winners were Robin Coste Lewis, awarded the prize for poetry for Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf), and Neal Shusterman, who won the Young People’s Literature Award for Challenger Deep (HarperCollins), a novel focused on mental illness.
Penguin Random House authors took home three of the four awards. And though the audience may have confirmed, yet again, the book industry’s lack of racial diversity, the NBA winners and finalists were diverse.
Johnson, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his novel The Orphan Master’s Son (Random), said in his acceptance speech that he was expecting a “calm evening” at the NBA ceremony and told his family not to make the cross-country trip because “winning this is not going to happen.”
Coates highlighted his creative relationship with his editor, Chris Jackson at Spiegel & Grau. His remarks echoed his book’s powerful sections on his time at Howard University and on Prince Carmen Jones, the young Howard student killed by a police officer: “The officer who killed him was not punished. He was sent back on the street as if nothing had happened.”
Shusterman’s book is a sobering account of mental illness inspired by and dedicated to his son Brendan, who joined him onstage. Lewis cited both the Hindu epic Mahabharata and “Keeping Quiet,” an antiwar poem by Pablo Naruda, in her acceptance speech, explaining that she “has studied and stolen from all of these great poets.” Bestselling novelist James Patterson was awarded the NBA’s Literarian Award for his support for reading and bookselling. He drew laughs when he described himself as the literary Big Mac on the menu at the posh Cipriani. Don DeLillo, author of Underworld, was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and spoke of how books “carry the power of memory.” He described a collection of paperbacks he has saved over the years, books he read as young man: “Here among these books, I’m not the writer at all; I’m the grateful reader.”