'Redeployment' wins big at National Book Awards
NEW YORK - Fiction about the Iraq War and non-fiction about China won the top prizes Wednesday night at the National Book Awards.
Phil Klay, who served in Iraq with the Marines as a public affairs officer, was the surprise winner over bigger names for his debut short story collection Redeployment (The Penguin Press).
"I did not expect to be up here," Klay said. But he said he "can't think of a more important conversation to be happening" than one about war and the Middle East.
Klay's competition in the fiction category included Marilynne Robinson for Lila. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Gilead in 2005. The other fiction finalists: Anthony Doerr for his World War II best seller All the Light We Cannot See; Emily St. John Mandel for her post-apocalyptic tale Station Eleven; and Rabih Alameddine for An Unnecessary Woman.
Evan Osnos won the non-fiction award for Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), based on his reporting as Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. The book examines the Communist Party's push to maintain control in a country in which the individual is rising.
Osnos beat out Roz Chast and her memoir in cartoons about her aging parents, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, as well as John Lahr for Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, a biography of the playwright.
The other non-fiction finalists were Anand Gopal for No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyesand Edward O. Wilson for The Meaning of Human Existence.
The evening's host Daniel Handler, aka best-selling children's author Lemony Snicket, opened the glittery black-tie evening at Cipriani's on Wall Street by saying the National Book Awards are "like the Oscars if nobody gave a (expletive) about the Oscars."
He joked that he'd been "deluged" with telegrams, including one from basketball legend Michael Jordan, who thanked the NBA "for everything they've done for the game," and Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who cabled: "I congratulate you all. Just kidding. You're going down, I'm going to slaughter you all, ha ha ha."
The National Book Awards, sponsored by the National Book Foundation, are the most prestigious literary awards in the USA, along with the Pulitzer Prize. They are chosen by panels of judges, most of whom are writers themselves.
The winner of the Young People's Literature award was Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Nancy Paulsen Books/ Penguin). In it, she tells the story of her childhood in verse. "I'm so grateful to be here. It's my third time a finalist, my first time a winner," Woodson said.
Louise Glück won the Poetry award for Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Glück previously won the Pulitzer Prize.
British author Neil Gaiman presented Ursula K. Le Guin with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for work spanning half a century. The influential writer of fantasy and science fiction is best-known for her books and stories set in the world of Earthsea.
Gaiman, who lauded Le Guin's writing on women's issues, said the older author "made me a better writer, and much more importantly she made me a much better person who wrote... she's a giant of literature who is finally getting recognized."
Le Guin said she was sharing her award with "all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow writers of fantasy and science fiction." She suggested theirs were voices that are needed in our "fear-stricken society."
She also surprised the room by criticizing the publishing industry for its commercial practices. "The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art," she said. "I really don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river."