 | |
| Paul Beatty (photo: Hanna Assouline) | |
An emotional Beatty told the crowd at the
awards ceremony, "I wasn't expecting this I have to say.... I can't
tell you guys how long the journey this has been for me." He added,
"I don't want tp get all dramatic - [that] writing saved my life or
anything -- but writing's given me a life."
Chair of judges Amanda Foreman commented:
"The Sellout
is a novel for our times. A tirelessly inventive modern satire, its humor
disguises a radical seriousness. Paul Beatty slays sacred cows with abandon and
takes aim at racial and political taboos with wit, verve and a snarl."
The book won the NBCC award for
fiction in March shortly after the trade paperback was released, but the
Booker win should give Sellout its deserved lift well above the
approximately 25,000 trade paperback units sold so far this year as tracked by
Nielsen Bookscan. Oneworld has already announced plans to reprint 120,000
copies for the UK, and another 40,000 copies for Australia, while Picador has
gone back to press already for 50,000 paperback copies (and an additional
10,000 hardcover copies from FSG) since Tuesday night's announcement and
expects to reprint "multiple times through the end of the year" to
the order of "many tens of thousands" of copies."
It's worth noting for the record that the
standard Booker rule of thumb -- the favorite never wins -- held true again.
Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing had led the betting books.
In other awards news, the ALA announced shortlists
for their Carnegie
Medals:
Fiction
Moonglow, by Michael Chabon
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
NonfictionMoonglow, by Michael Chabon
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith
The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship, by Patricia Bell-Scott,
Evicted, by Matthew Desmond
Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, by Patrick Phillips
No comments:
Post a Comment