The winners of the National Book Awards were announced Wednesday evening at a ceremony in Manhattan, with Justin Torres, Ned Blackhawk, and Dan Santat among the winners of the prestigious literary awards.
The National Book Award for fiction went to Torres for his novel Blackouts, about a two gay men—the 20-something narrator and a dying elderly man—holding a vigil and far-reaching dialogue at a housing complex in an unnamed desert. A reviewer for Kirkus called Blackouts an “inventive novel that displays the scope of its author’s ambitions.”
The nonfiction award went to Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, an exploration of how Indigenous peoples and cultures have been excluded from the traditional presentation of American history. The author, a professor of history and faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, said he was “thrilled beyond words.”
The award for young people’s literature went to A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat. The book is a graphic memoir of the author/illustrator’s school trip to Europe at age 13. “Full of laughter and sentiment,” said Kirkus’ starred review, “this is a nudge for readers to dare to try new things.”
The Words That Remain, written by Stênio Gardel and translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato, won the award for translated literature. The book is the debut novel by a Brazilian writer, originally published in Portuguese.
The poetry prize was presented to from unincorporated territory [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez. The collection is the fifth in the poet’s series about the history of his native Guam and Indigenous Chamoru people.
LeVar Burton, actor and former host of the educational program Reading Rainbow, returned for his second stint as host of the ceremony. “This is the best room in the world on this night,” he said. Burton introduced special guest Oprah Winfrey who called the assembled guests—most who work in the publishing industry—her “heroes and heroines.”
As Torres delivered the final acceptance remarks of the evening, a group of finalists for the various awards gathered on stage to deliver a statement, read by fiction finalist Aaliyah Bilal. “We oppose the ongoing war in Gaza,” Bilal said. “We oppose antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian sentiment, and Islamophobia equally, knowing that further bloodshed does nothing to secure lasting peace.”
Tom Beer is the editor-in-in-chief.
