Erdrich, Boo, Alexander and Ferry Win National Book Awards

01:0The National Book Awards, given last night went to (annotations are from the National Book Awards site):

Fiction

The Round House, Louise Erdrich, Harper

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe.

 

Nonfiction

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo, Random House

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope: Individual stories of courage set against the backdrop of tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy.

Young People’s Literature

Goblin Secrets, William Alexander, S&S.Margaret K. McElderry

Rownie, the youngest in Graba the witchworker’s household of stray children, escapes and goes looking for his missing brother. Along the way he falls in with a troupe of theatrical goblins and learns the secret origins of masks.

 

Poetry

Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, David FerryUniversity of Chicago Press

The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s poems modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century.
 

Videos of the event are available on the National Book Foundation’s web site.

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