Ursula Le Guin shines at National Book Awards

The 65th National Book Awards took place in frigid New York last night (19th November), but the literary establishment donned finery and dinner jackets to the Wall Street venue undaunted by the cold. Perseus c.e.o. David Steinberger noted that this was “the largest crowd” he had addressed in his years as NBF chair.  

Former Marine Phil Klay and his publisher Penguin Press scored a major upset over Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner), Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (Farrar, Straus) and others in winning the fiction award for Redeployment, a first collection of stories about soldiers on the front lines in Anbar province and back home.

In non-fiction, New Yorker writer Evan Osnos prevailed over contenders like John Lahr’s biography Tennessee Williams (Norton) and Roz Chast’s graphic memoir of her parents’ decline, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant (Bloomsbury), with his Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus). Osnos’s publisher-journalist father Peter (founder of Public Affairs), was there to see his son win.

Throughout the evening, Amazon and Jeff Bezos featured prominently in jokes and gibes. Master of ceremonies Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), imagined Bezos saying, “Allow me to offer support to my publishers…Just kidding. You’re going down. I’m going to slaughter you. You’re going down…”

Noting that two of the five poetry finalists were published by non-profit Graywolf Press, Handler jested, “If you’re a publishing house not interested in making a profit, please see Jeff Bezos afterward.”

On the other hand, Hachette c.e.o. Michael Pietsch, cool as a cucumber, was - apart from the prize-winners - undoubtedly the most congratulated man mingling under the coffered ceiling of the huge Cipriani banqueting hall.

By most accounts, though, the star of the evening turned out to be 85-year-old Ursula K Le Guin. Presented with the award for distinguished contribution to American letters by Neil Gaiman (who noted that while “other” writers “may have got their own ideas about going to wizard school, Ursula did it first”), Le Guin brought the room to its feet when she spoke.

She wowed listeners with out-loud home truths about the difference between “commodity profiteers who sell us like deodorant and tell us what to write” and the true aims of art. “We just saw a profiteer trying to punish a publisher,” the creator of the Earthsea series declared, although publishers, as well as booksellers, came in for some scrutiny.

“We love you!” a woman responded, shouting from the floor.   

“Capitalism’s power seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings,” Le Guin continued. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by people.” She said that she didn’t want, at the end of her long career, “to watch American literature get sold down the river. We should demand a fair share of the proceeds in the name of the beautiful reward. It’s not profit; its name is freedom.”

The winner of the award for young people’s literature was favorite Jacqueline Woodson, for Brown Girl Dreaming (Penguin), and the poetry award went to Louise Gluck for Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus).

The Literarian award for outstanding service to the American literary community was given to Kyle Zimmer, president and CEO of First Book, which, as presenter Mary Pope Osborne noted, Zimmer founded in 1992 with two friends. It has harnessed the private sector to help distribute 120 million books to underserved children – and is now expanding to distribute globally.

“Books are the most powerful force in the universe, and history supports this,” Zimmer said in accepting the award. “That’s why it was illegal to teach slaves how to read, and why today, girls are tortured and shot when they attempt to attend school.”

Both domestically, with “45% of American kids being raised today in homes that are poor or near-poor,” and internationally, “we are confronting a dramatic battle,” Zimmer said, urging listeners “to find that inner Bilbo Baggins, Catniss, or Hermione – and join us.”

Image by Marian Wood Kolisch