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When 700 gathered in person last night for the 73rd National Book Awards (NBA) after two years on Zoom, it may well have been the largest literary meet-up in New York since Covid began, and the palpable joy simply in being together was clear. Also clear: that themes touching on the fight for democracy, freedom and all kinds of diversity were in the air, in the nominated and winning books, and in most of the speeches. Emcee Padma Lakshmi, whose fame rests, among other things, on food books and cooking programmes, got the ball rolling. “Books also feed us,” Lakshmi said, “and the [diverse] nominations tonight paint a truer picture of what it means to be an American.”
Coming after the past few tumultuous years, let alone after an election last week when many citizens had held their breath, fearing what might happen at the polls, the passion in the speeches and the passionate cheers they received were both an exhalation and a call to action for the hard work to be done.
Professor Ibram X Kendi, a previous NBA winner and author of bestselling books on anti-racism, described libraries as both a “vehicle and driver of justice” as he presented Tracie D Hall the Award for Outstanding Service to the Literary Community. The first Black woman to lead the American Library Association, Hall declared: “It’s a universal truth that one of the real tests of liberty is the right to read,” and yet “over 43 million people in the US cannot read above third-grade level.” Librarians are “on the front lines of upholding our democracy,” at a time when contemporary acts of censorship “have now surpassed those of the McCarthy era.”
Comics master Art Spiegelman, best known for Maus (Penguin)—his family story of the Holocaust where the Nazis are portrayed as cats and the Jews as mice—was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by his friend Neil Gaiman, who characterised him as “genius and mensch”. Maus, Spiegelman recalled, was rejected by just about “every publisher in town”. It took 13 years of work, and “is a book for adults, not Auschwitz for beginners”. With “fascist storm clouds gathering all over the planet”—and those cats and mice once more censored in parts of the US—Maus is “a cautionary tale again, and again, and again”.
The Fiction prize went to first novelist Tess Gunty’s Rabbit Hutch (published by Oneworld in the UK and Knopf in the US), one of three debuts among the five finalists, and already named this year’s winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover prize. Gunty spoke of how “attention is the most sacred resource we have to spend on the planet” and we should “spend it freely on books”. Princeton professor of African-American Studies Imani Perry, the Nonfiction winner for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of America (Ecco), passed on some of her grandmother’s wisdom. “She used to say, ‘You weren’t born to live on flowerbeds of ease.’ These are difficult times.”
Sabaa Tahir described herself as “the first Muslim Pakistani-American woman” to win the Young People’s Literature prize, for All My Rage (Atom in the UK, Razorbill in the US), wanting it “to honour Muslim sisters fighting for their lives, honour and the right to tell our stories”. Poetry winner John Keene (for Punks, Song Cave) urged the audience “to support libraries and librarians and workers in the publishing industry”—at a time when a picket line is outside HarperCollins, Keene as well as others sported badges in support of unions. And the newest prize, for Translated Literature, went to Argentinian Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses (also published by Oneworld in the UK and Riverhead in the US), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.