National Book Award Winners Announced

The winners for this year’s National Book Award have just been announced. Congratulations to all the honorees!

First established in 1936, the National Book Awards began recognizing Children’s Literature in 1969, a category that was then transformed into an award for “Young People’s Literature” in 1996. The winners were announced at the National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20th.

Winners in bold.

In the Young People’s Literature category:

• Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
• Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
• Tom McNeal, Far Far Away (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
• Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group USA)
• Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints (First Second/Macmillan)

In the Fiction category

• Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
• Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
• James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA)
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA)
• George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House)

In the Non-Fiction category:

• Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)
• Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House)

In the Poetry category:

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA)
• Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press)
• Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems (Graywolf Press)

Excerpts from all the finalists are available for free download on the National Book Awards site here.