National Book Award

Percival Everett wins the National Book Award fiction prize

1:20am November 21, 2024

Everett's novel James is a retelling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The prestigious literary prize also awards the best in non-fiction, poetry, translated literature and young people's literature.

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Tess Gunty's novel 'The Rabbit Hutch' wins National Book Award for fiction

11:42pm November 16, 2022

by The Associated Press

Tess Gunty's "The Rabbit Hutch," a sweeping novel set in a low-income housing community in Indiana, has won the National Book Award for fiction.

Gerald Stern speaks to the audience during the National Book Awards in New York Wednesday, Nov. 18, 1998. Stern, one of the country's most loved and respected poets who wrote with spirited melancholy and earthly humor about his childhood, Judaism, mortality and the wonders of the contemplative life, has died.

Gerald Stern, prize-winning and lyrical poet, dies at 97

1:54am October 30, 2022

by The Associated Press

Stern was one of the country's most loved and respected poets who wrote with spirited melancholy and earthly humor about his childhood, Judaism, mortality and the wonders of the contemplative life.

The Rio Grande is seen from the International Bridge near a section of the U.S.-Mexico border where a father and daughter drowned attempting to cross into the United States in 2019, in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Oscar Alberto Martinez and his 23-month-old dau

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Poetry inspired by a viral photo of drowned migrants wins the National Book Award

4:41pm November 18, 2021

by Bill Chappell

Photos of a father and his young daughter, drowned in the Rio Grande, underlined the deadly risks of the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Martín Espada drew on them for his book Floaters.

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National Book Awards Add Category Honoring Works In Translation

5:09pm January 31, 2018

by Colin Dwyer

The new prize will consider both fiction and nonfiction translated into English and published in the U.S. It's the first addition to the National Book Foundation's annual slate in over two decades.

Jesmyn Ward poses for a portrait near DeLisle Bayou in DeLisle, Miss. Ward, 40, has chosen to return to DeLisle and raise her children there, despite her profound ambivalence about what the town represents.

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Writing Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward Salvages Stories Of The Silenced

4:31pm August 31, 2017

by Melissa Block

The author's books are set in the poor, black Mississippi community where she grew up, a place where, she says, "the past bears very heavily on the present."

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Denis Johnson, who won the 2007 National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, died Thursday.

Denis Johnson, Author Who Wrote Of The 'Painfully Beautiful,' Dies At 67

3:32pm May 26, 2017

by Colin Dwyer

The National Book Award-winning novelist was perhaps best known for Jesus' Son, a book of interwoven stories focused on the lives of addicts. A spokesman for his publisher tells NPR he died Wednesday.

Jacqueline Woodson, pictured here at the National Book Awards ceremony last month, won the young people's literature prize for her memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming.

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Book News: Jacqueline Woodson Addresses Lemony Snicket's Watermelon Joke

7:35am June 19, 2015

by Colin Dwyer

"His historical context, unlike my own, came from a place of ignorance," writes the National Book Award-winning Woodson, responding to racially charged comments delivered after she won her prize.