Oneworld's Beatty wins major US award

The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which will be published by Oneworld in May, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the US last night (17th March).

The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual literary awards held in the US to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".

The Sellout is set in an "impoverished LA County ghetto" and follows the narrator's attempt to re-legalise segregation and slavery, a plan that takes him to the Supreme Court.

Beatty's satire of race and inequality in 21st century America "underscores the absurdities of racial injustice", and "offers a subtle examination of the roles of place and race in the formation of identity".

Beatty was born in Los Angeles in 1962 and is the author of three previous novels: Tuff (vintage), The White Boy Shuffle (Vintage), and Slumberland (Bloomsbury), as well as two volumes of poetry. He lives in New York.

The Sellout was first published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March 2015. Oneworld will publish in the UK at the beginning of May.