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.

The National Book Foundation

The finalists for America's National Book Award were announced yesterday. These are the shortlisted fiction titles (because this is the category that interests me most) with links to further information about book and author :

Bonnie Jo Campbell - American Salvage
Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin
Daniyal Mueenuddin - In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Jayne Anne Phillips - Lark and Termite
Marcel Theroux - Far North

Do check out the other nominees in the Non-Fiction, Young People's and Poetry categories on the National Book Foundation's website.

More about this year's nominations at Jacket Copy, and I will add as postscripts any other interesting links of the topic I come across.

Robinson, Bolaño Nominated for National Book Award

The National Book Critics Circle have announced the 2008 shortlists. These are the fiction titles :

Roberto Bolaño - 2666
Marilynne Robinson - Home
Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project
M. Glenn Taylor - The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart
Elizabeth Strout - Olive Kittredge

You can see all the nominations in other categories here.

The National Book Awards 2008

Once again playing catch-up with news of book prizes. Forgive me for being slow.

The National Book Awards are among the most important in the American literary calendar. This year's winner in the fiction category was Peter Matthiessen for Shadow Country, a reworking of a previously published trilogy of novels about an Florida Everglades pioneer. The novel is described on the website as :

... an epic of American rise and descent—poetic, mythic, devastating. From his Everglades trilogy Peter Matthiessen has coaxed a masterpiece, a wrenching story of familial, racial and environmental degradation stretching from the Civil War to the Great Depression. His E.J. Watson emerges through a dazzling array of voices as a singular figure in our national literature, the looming personification of manifest destiny within the dark reaches of our history.

Matthiessen himself sounds an amazing guy, not only a novelist but also a naturalist and a Zen priest.

The runners up were (with links to the NBA site so you can go read about them!):

Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project
Rachel Kushner - Telex from Cuba
Marilynne Robinson - Home
Salvatore Scibona - The End

In the non-fiction category the winner was Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, the Poetry Award was won by Mark Doty for Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems, and the Young People's Literature Award by Judy Blundell for What I Saw and How I Lied.

The full lists of runners up in each category are on the website, along with information about the books and authors, and interviews with each one of them.

Motoko Rich has an account of the awards on the New York Times website.

National Book Awards 2008

Some how between being there and getting back here, I managed to miss announcing the shortlist for the National Book award.

Winners will be announced on November 19th. Here are the finalists in fiction :

Aleksandar Hemon - The Lazarus Project
Rachel Kushner - Telex from Cuba
Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country
Marilynne Robinson - Home
Salvatore Scibona - The End

You can watch the video of the 2008 National Book Awards Announcement in all categories here.

Vietnam War Story Wins National Book Award

The National Book Award for fiction has been won by Denis Johnson (left) for Tree of Smoke, a novel which, according to Motoko Rich in the New York Times:

... features intersecting stories of an array of American and Vietnamese soldiers and intelligence officers

Johnson has previously published numerous novels, short stories, plays and poems, and won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction for Train Dreams in 2002.

Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, won the non-fiction prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.

Weiner (right) has been writing on American intelligence to for twenty years, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on national security programmes. This book tells the history of the CIA and highlights its failures.

Here's the author talking about his book:


The prize for young people’s literature went to Sherman Alexie for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian:

... an autobiographical story of a 14-year-old Spokane Indian who leaves his poverty-stricken reservation school and moves to a wealthy, all-white school.

while the poetry prize went to former poet laureate Robert Hass for Time and Materials: Poems 1997 to 2005.

Essayist and novelist Joan Didion was honoured with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Meanwhile, Across the Atlantic ...

Right, now we've got the Booker excitement out of the way, it's time to shimmy across the Atlantic to see what's happening with a couple of other very important literary awards. (And as always thanks Eric for jogging my memory).

The shortlists for the National Book Awards in the US were announced. The fiction list interests me most, so here it is.

Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork (A thriller set in northern Thailand with anthropologists and missionaries competing with each other for influence over the hill tribes.)

Lydia Davis - Varieties of Disturbance (A collection of "spare and always surprising" short fiction. )

Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End (A comedy set in the world of advertising.)

Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke ("An epic novel of bungled espionage and small mercies in the Vietnam era.")

Jim Shepard - Like You’d Understand ("Eleven first-person stories that offer an eclectic overview of the human experience.")

You can see all the shortlists of books in all categories on the NBA website, and then click through to read more about the selected titles and authors.

The finalists will be announced on 14th November.

The other award is Canada's Scotiabank Giller prize, which provides us with another tasty list of novels:

Elizabeth Hay - Late Nights on Air (The lady is compared to Annie Proulx and Isabel Allende - that's enough for me!)

Michael Ondaatje - Divisadero (I'm still wondering how one of my favourite authors could have missed the Booker boat completely, so I'm glad to see it here. I have this one lined up to read.)

Daniel Poliquin - A Secret Between Us ("An epic tale of a wartorn society in the midst of astonishing transformation.")

M.G. Vassanji - The Assassin’s Song (Vassanji has won the Giller Prize twice before, and I have a copy of his earlier The In-Between World of Vikram Lall - acquired at a times warehouse sale! - waiting to be read.* This novel is described as a "memorable, melancholy family saga.")

Alissa York - Effigy ("A stunning novel of loss, memory, despair and deliverance by one of Canada’s best young fiction writers, set on a Mormon ranch in nineteenth-century Utah.")

More information about the prize and the individual titles here. The winner will be announced November 6th.

*One of the judges for the Giller is our friend, Camilla Gibb, who recommended Vassanji's novel to me when I asked her advice about the best Canadian fiction to read.

American Born Books

The graphic novel really is getting respectable. So respectable in fact that for the first time one was shortlisted for a major literary award. Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese was nominated for the 2006 National Book Award in the Young People's Writing category. Writes Edward Guthman in the San Fransisco Chronicle:

That pride of identity is the overriding theme of "American Born Chinese," which tells the story of Jin Wang, a son of Chinese immigrants who moves to the suburbs from San Francisco's Chinatown and struggles to assimilate at a mostly white school. Yang interweaves Jin's journey with two other stories: the legend of the Monkey King, a Chinese folk hero; and a sitcom starring Chin-Kee, a gross Chinese stereotype with buck teeth and a habit of interchanging his r's and l's. ... It's easy to imagine, while reading "American Born Chinese," that Yang based Jin Wang's story largely on his own childhood. The author says that's true: "I was Asian and I wore glasses and I was really skinny, and I knew that I was stereotyped as a nerd. So there was part of me that kind of rebelled against that."

The National Book Awards began in 1950 when a consortium of book publishing groups sponsored the first ceremony and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to highlight exceptional American writing, and increase the popularity of reading in general. The awards recognize achievements in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature.

The overall winner in the fiction section was The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, with runners up:

Mark Z. Danielewski - Only Revolutions
Ken Kalfus - A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document
Jess Walter - The Zero

The poetry award went to Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem. Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl took the award for non-fiction. And Yang was beaten to the main prize for Young People's Literature by M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (now that's a title!). The complete shortlist is archived here.

(Thanks, Kamal, for your notes and recommendations in the e-mails you sent and if The Worst Hard Time really is better than The Grapes of Wrath, I must buy it!)