NEW YORK -- The National Book Awards ceremony this week, held just blocks from the Occupy Wall Street protests, was a gilded tribute to the 99 percent.
Stories of resilience in the face of poverty, displacement and disappearance were awarded Wednesday night as hundreds of writers, editors, publishers and other industry officials gathered under the 70-foot ceilings of the luxury venue Cipriani Wall Street.
"I thought I should point out, since nobody else has," said poet Ann Lauterbach, who introduced honorary winner John Ashbery, "that we are occupying Wall Street."
Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones," a bleak but determined novel about a black community in Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina, won the fiction prize. Ms. Ward's acceptance, the culmination of a night of emotional speeches and tributes to those who had been silenced, noted that the death of her younger brother had inspired her to become a writer. She realized that life was a "feeble, unpredictable thing," but that books were a testament of strength before a punishing world.
"I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South," said Ms. Ward, whose brother was hit by a drunken driver the year she graduated from college.
Ms. Ward's novel, picked over such better known works as Tea Obreht's "The Tiger's Wife," was based partly on firsthand experience. She was with her family in Mississippi when Katrina hit. They fled the house, fearful of drowning in their own attic.
Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve," a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction. The poetry prize went to Nikki Finney's "Head Off & Split," summation of African-American history from slavery to Katrina, while Thanhhai Lai's "Inside Out & Back Again," the story of a Vietnamese family in Alabama, won for young people's literature at a time when the state is reconsidering sweeping anti-immigration laws that went into effect in September.
Winners each receive $10,000.
Honorary prizes were given to Florida-based bookseller Mitch Kaplan, who looked back warmly on a 30-year career/calling in a business he found more fulfilling than law school, and to Mr. Ashbery, a highly praised poet with an acknowledged reputation for an inaccessible style, who called writing a "pleasure I can almost taste."
The National Books Awards are chosen by separate panels of writers for each category. Judges looked through 1,223 books in all. This year's prizes were born in controversy, after the nominees were first announced weeks ago. The list for young people's literature initially included "Shine," by the popular author Lauren Myracle. But the National Book Foundation, which sponsors the awards, quickly acknowledged that "Shine" had been inadvertently chosen over Franny Billingsley's "Chime." Nominees are read over the phone by the judging committee to the foundation and one title was mistaken for the other. In an embarrassing see-saw of decisions, Ms. Myracle was removed, reinstated, then pushed into withdrawing.
First Published: November 18, 2011, 5:00 a.m.
