His fiction counterpart, Adam Johnson, took a slightly different tone when accepting the award for his short story collection Fortune Smiles. “I told my wife and my kids, ‘Don’t come across America because this is not going to happen,’” joked Johnson, who lives in California.
So went last night’s awards ceremony, with one shoo-in taking home a prize a long time coming, and one win that left even the awardee surprised. The National Book awards were established in 1950, with the first fiction prize awarded to Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm and the first non-fiction award going to a biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Past winners have included luminaries such as Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor and Ralph Ellison. This year, finalists included both a Pulitzer winner – Johnson, who took home the 2013 award for The Orphan Master’s Son – and a first-time author: Angela Flournoy, whose The Turner House chronicles several generations of a Detroit family.
Like all literary awards, the National Book Awards struggles to balance merit and general popularity when choosing the winners. This year’s selections show that the judges have a keen sense of American politics right now, choosing three books tied to some of the most pressing social issues of the day.
Coates, a national correspondent for the Atlantic and one of this year’s MacArthur “Genius” fellows, has won widespread praise (and comparisons to James Baldwin) for Between the World and Me, which takes the form of a letter to his son. His memoir has been so central to the national conversation on race and police brutality that the publisher pushed the release date up three months in light of the continuing protests over Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and others. Coates dedicated his win to Prince Jones, a classmate killed by a police officer who was included in his book.
He has waited 15 years, he says, because “when Prince Jones died, there were no cameras, there was nobody looking”, and so the police officer went unpunished. Now, with the ubiquity of cameras and video recording, the world is watching at large – and also watching are the gatekeepers of literary prestige, who have decided to throw their weight behind this issue. This can also be discerned in the poetry prize, which last year was awarded to Louise Glück for her 16th collection of poems and yesterday went to a debut collection about the black female form through history. Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus is an especially interesting choice given that Between the World and Me has been criticized for being shallow in its treatment of black women.
The young literature prize, too, went to a book that deals with an issue plucked from the headlines – in this case, youth and mental health. Neal Shusterman won with Challenger Deep, a book about a teenager’s struggle with mental illness that was inspired by his son.
On the fiction side, Johnson’s Fortune Smiles – six stories about technology, natural disaster and politics – was widely considered a wild card that beat frontrunners Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, a twice-narrated novel about marriage, and Hanya Yanagihara’s much-feted A Little Life about four friends navigating their lives in New York City. Though short stories are generally seen as a hard sell, Fortune Smiles is the second consecutive story collection, after Phil Klay’s Redeployment, to take home the prize.
Article Appeared @http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/19/national-book-awards-ta-nehisi-coates-politics-poetry-short-stories