After the shock: Kingsolver and Everett win at hope-filled 75th National Book Awards

Barbara Kingsolver and Percival Everett have been crowned winners at the 75th National Book Awards, held in New York—but it was a year when, beneath the glitter, the shock and fear of recent weeks came back to the fore. With chaos knocking at the door, the job of the NBA seemed to be to provide rallying cries, consolation, hope and community, but also the challenges and discomforts of truth. The election, climate change, racism, refugees, Gaza and even Taiwan—all had their moment. Or two or three.

"Hard times are coming when we’ll want the voices of those who can battle and come together to stand up for books", said Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation, the organisation that sponsors the awards and uses the benefit money to go inside schools, libraries and even public housing estates to spread the word about the power of books to change lives.

Percival Everett, who won the fiction prize to resounding acclaim for James (Mantle), admitted that "the last two weeks, I’ve been feeling pretty low, and am still pretty low. As I look out at the excitement about the book, it gives me some hope," but quickly added that "hope is no substitute for strategy".

Jason De Léon, winner of the non-fiction award for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking), declared: "I will not accept this dystopian American future of all this garbage the incoming administration wants to propagate and profit from. Let’s all go read some banned books!"

Poetry winner Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, author of Something About Living (University of Akron Press), whose father was born in Palestine, insisted: "I don’t want to console, I want us to be uncomfortable, to demand any administration we pay for should stop funding genocide."

Young people’s literature winner Shifa Saltagi Safadi, whose verse tale, Kareem Between (Putnam Books for Young Readers), concerns a middle-school Muslim American boy, wanted to fight “the dehumanisation” of Muslims by writing a story "where we’re the heroes". Translated literature winner, Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf), by Yang Shuang-zi, translated from Mandarin by Lin King, was in part, Yang said, "a recognition for the place we come from, Taiwan".

Prior to the event, controversy erupted about the choice of W Paul Coates (father of Ta-Nehisi Coates and a former Black Panther) as winner of the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. The award recognised his work founding and running Black Classics Press and BCP Digital Printing, specialising in "republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent". Two articles had accused some BCP books of having racist, antisemitic and homophobic content. The NBA stood by its choice, and Coates, receiving his award from Walter Mosley, spoke of his mission "making Black narratives known", curating "radical and less popular voices" and being "supported by my community since 1972".

However, it was Kingsolver’s acceptance speech for the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters that contained a passion to match the red of her dress.

The self-described “country girl from Kentucky in the disguise of a sparkly dress” said: “I have written through crises; administrations rose and fell; I’ve seen total eclipses. I know when all goes dark, the sun is still up there... Writers have to ask the big, scary, uncomfortable questions for the people who really need us. We’re at our best when we’re disrupters, when we rattle self-absorption, when we lure people into letting go of themselves so they can look into the soul of another. That empathy is our salvation. We are still each other’s only hope, as James Baldwin said... Truth and love have been struck down so many times... but truth is like the sun behind the eclipse. It’s still there, and love stays alive if you tend it... Our job is to invent a better ending. There are so many of us to do it. We are not erased. We are still here, like the sun behind the eclipse.”