2013 National Book Awards Revealed

The winners of the 64th National Book Awards were announced at a ceremony at Cipriani in downtown Manhattan on Wednesday evening. More than 700 members of the book community gathered for the reveal of the recipients of the 2013 awards, presented by the National Book Foundation. 

Publishers Lunch Report:

The National Book Awards' move towards greater visibility and recognition culminated in much the same way as in previous years: a mixture of expected and surprise winners. New Yorker staff writer George Packer took the nonfiction prize for THE UNWINDING, while James McBride's THE GOOD LORD BIRD (Riverhead) won the fiction prize, surprising the author -- who did not prepare a speech, since he was among those who expected one of the other nominees to prevail. "They are fine writers," McBride said of the other nominees, "but this sure is nice." The judges called him "a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain." Packer thanked the workers he wrote about "for trusting me with their stories to illustrate what's gone wrong with America."

Riverhead plans to reprint an additional 45,000 copies of THE GOOD LORD BIRD, bringing the total number of copies in print to more than 82,000. Nielsen Bookscan shows sales of just under 10,000 hardcovers so far through the outlets they track. The service has tabulated print sales of just under 44,000 copies for Packer's book, and close to 1,400 copies for young people's literature winner Cynthia Kadohata's book.

Earlier in the evening, Toni Morrison presented the Literarian Award to Maya Angelou, who charmed the crowd with her singing and closed her speech by noting that "easy reading is damn hard writing." E.L. Doctorow, presented with the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, perplexed some with an extended speech about the Internet, "ubiquitous and loomingly present in everything we do." Doctorow said, "What the techies don't know is that reading is the essence of interactivity. Only when a book is read is it complete." He concluded noting that "everyone is in the free speech business."

The full roster of award winners are:

Fiction
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride (Riverhead)

Nonfiction
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer (FSG)

Poetry
Incarnadine, Mary Szybist (Graywolf)

Young People's Literature

The Thing About Luck, Cynthia Kadohata (Atheneum) 

L.-r.: NBA winners George Packer, Cynthia Kadohata, Mary Szybist, James McBride Photo-Shelf Awareness