“I really wish my father was here for this.”įew references were made to the recent election, though politics did help inspire Yu, whose previous books include the story collections “Third Class Superhero” and “Sorry Please Thank You." He had struggled with “Interior Chinatown,” wondering if there was a reason to tell an immigration story, until the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016. “This is such a bittersweet moment,” Tamara Payne said upon accepting the award Wednesday night. Les Payne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, died in 2018. The scholar Manning Marable died right before the 2011 publication of “Malcolm X,” which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and receive a National Book Award nomination. The award for “The Dead Are Arising” is the second time in a decade a Malcolm X biography has received a high honor for nonfiction and the second time the honor was, at least in part, posthumous. Mosley, the first Black man to win the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, spoke of his debt to such literary heroes as Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman and Ralph Ellison. “DMZ Colony” combines poetry, prose and images in its exploration of the history between the United States and South Korea. Yu's novel is a sendup of Chinese stereotypes and of the immigrants' conflict between wanting to assimilate and asserting their true selves. As of Wednesday evening, just over $490,000 had been pledged from 851 donors. The foundation instead has been asking for donations of $50 or more. The traditional dinner ceremony is the nonprofit National Book Foundation's most important source of income and is usually held at Cipriani Wall Street, where publishers and other officials pay thousands of dollars for tables or individual seats. The children's author and current US Youth Ambassador for young adult literature Jason Reynolds served as emcee, and along with Bob Woodward and Walter Isaacson was among the Simon & Schuster writers who appeared in a taped tribute to Reidy.īecause of the pandemic, one of publishing's most high-profile gatherings was streamed online, with presenters and winners speaking everywhere from New York to Japan.
Honorary medals were given Wednesday night to mystery novelist Walter Mosley and to the late CEO of Simon & Schuster, Carolyn Reidy, who died in May at age 71. The poetry prize went to Don Mee Choi's “DMZ Colony" and the winner for best translated work was Yu Miri's “Tokyo Ueno Station,” translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles. Tamara Payne and her father the late Les Payne's Malcolm X biography, “The Dead Are Arising,” was cited for nonfiction and Kacen Callender's “King and the Dragonflies” for young people's literature. NEW YORK (AP) - Charles Yu's “Interior Chinatown,” a satirical, cinematic novel written in the form of a screenplay, has won the National Book Award for fiction.
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