Thursday, November 19, 2009

Colum McCann Takes NBA Fiction Prize

The National Book Award winners were announced November 18 during a ceremony in New York City. These are probably the major US awards after the Pulitzer Prize, and there are several categories.

The prize for fiction went to Irish author Colum McCann for Let the Great World Spin, which is based on life in New York City in the 1970s. The piece was described as an "indelibly hallucinatory portrait of a decaying city" by judges.

T. J. Stiles wins the non-fiction award for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Keith Waldrop, the poetry award for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy. Phillip Hoose took the Young People's Literature Prize for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice.

Gore Vidal wins an award for distinguished contribution to American letters, while Dave Eggars wins the Literian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

This year there was also a bonus prize to mark the awards' 60th anniversary. The public voted online for the Best of the National Book Awards, and the winner was Flannery O'Connor's The Complete Stories. Finalists included books by John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon and Eudora Welty.

You can find interviews with all these authors and information about the books on the NBF website.

2 comments:

d said...

Hi Sharon! I have been stalking your blog for over a year now and I figured that it's high time I commented on it.
I, too, am a book addict. Actually, I'm a writer. An amateur one, really; but hopefully that will change soon enough! I'm fifteen and am from Malaysia as well. I'm almost about to finish novel and I hope to publish it real soon. And I am sure you have experience with this sort of thing; is there any advice that would come in handy?

Thank you! (:

d said...
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