Saturday, November 17, 2012

Louise Erdrich wins National Book award for fiction


National Book award wins for Louise Erdrich and Katherine Boo - and an honourary award for Elmore Leonard.

Louise Erdrich won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction for The Round House
Louise Erdrich won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction for The Round House Photo: Harper Collins
Louise Erdrich has won America's National Book Award for fiction for The Round House.
Erdrich, 58, has been a highly regarded author for nearly 30 years and The Round House (the second in a planned trilogy) is about a teenage boy’s effort to investigate a racial attack on his mother on a North Dakota reservation.
Erdrich, who is part Ojibwe, accepted the award in English and in her Native American language. She said she wanted to acknowledge “the grace and endurance of native women,” adding, "this is a book about a huge case of injustice ongoing on reservations. Thank you for giving it a wider audience.”
Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers won the nonfiction award for her account of people living in a slum in the shadow of luxury hotels in India. “If this prize means anything,” Boo said in her acceptance speech, “it is that small stories in so-called hidden places matter because they implicate and complicate what we consider to be the larger story, which is the story of people who do have political and economic powers.”

David Ferry's Bewilderment won for poetry while William Alexander's Goblin Secrets claimed the prize for children's literature. Each winner receives £6,300 and were chosen from a list of 1300 books on the original submission list in the 63rd annual National Book awards.
Honourary prizes were given to New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr and novelist Elmore Leonard.
Leonard, 87, was presented with his award in New York by Martin Amis and he joked that while Amis was the more critically acclaimed writer he himself “haver appeared as a category on ‘Jeopardy!’" Leonard added: "I am energised by this honour. The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do in my life is tell stories, and this award tells me I am still good at it."

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