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Sigrid Nunez won the National Book of Fiction Award on Wednesday night for her novel "The Friend," which tells the story of a lonely writer who consoles himself after the suicide of his friend who takes care of his great Danish.
Meditation sometimes bitter about loss and love, the novel was one of this year's favorites. Times critic Dwight Garner described it as "dry, allusive and charming," noting that when the fragile writer adopts the big, heavy dog, "comedy is written here."
"The Friend" may have also attracted critics and judges this year due to his exploration of sexual harassment: the main character's friend was a prominent writer who had taken advantage of his fame to nurture relationships inappropriate with his younger students.
In their quote, the judges described "The Friend" as "an extraordinarily written and deeply human exploration of grief, literature and memory".
Mrs. Nunez – the author of the novels "Salvation City", "The last of its kind", "A feather on the breath of God" and "For Rouenna", among other books – spoke in his Acceptance speeches of how writers are able to find meaning to pain and emotional trials because suffering and loss can generate great literature.
"As terrible as it may seem, it can be helpful," she said.
Jeffrey C. Stewart won the Fiction Prize for his book "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke". Mr. Locke, philosopher, was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
The awards, awarded by the National Book Foundation, date back to 1950. Some of the most influential writers in America have received them, including WH Auden, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O. Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Adrienne Rich, JD Salinger, Eudora Welty and William Carlos Williams.
The ceremony, which took place at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan, during a black tie dinner with hundreds of guests, is usually the most glamorous literary event of the year. . Actor Nick Offerman animated and adopted a serious note: "In our inexorable quest for freedom and human rights, books serve both as weapons and shields," he said. he declared. "They are perhaps the greatest creation of humanity."
A new category for translated literature has been introduced this year; "The emissary" of Yoko Tawada and translated by Margaret Mitsutani won first prize.
Elizabeth Acevedo's novel, "The poet X", won the prize for children's literature. Written in verse, she tells the story of a young girl from a 15-year-old Harlem Dominican family who navigates in the perils of adolescence and finds solace in her notebook. poetry.
"Indecency" of Justin Phillip Reed won the prize of poetry. In their quote, the judges praised the collection as a "formally explosive" work that makes "privacy both a refuge and a weapon".
The prolific Chilean writer Isabel Allende accepted the foundation's prize, making it the object of all her achievements, becoming the first Spanish-speaking author to receive this prize. "The values and principles that support our civilization are under siege," she said in her acceptance speech. "If we listen to the story of another person, if we tell our own story, we begin to heal from division and hatred."
The finalists for this year's fiction included a mix of experimental fiction from independent publishers such as Soho Press and Graywolf (10 of the 25 finalists were books published by small presses) and confirmed novelists. The finalists also included Lauren Groff, who was on the list of finalists for "Florida" and who was widely expected to win in 2015; and Rebecca Makkai, the author of three previous books, nominated for "The Great Believers," on a group of gay friends living in Chicago in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic.
Some of the biggest surprises in the fiction category did not concern the five writers who were selected, but the critical and commercial favorites that had been forgotten. Two of this year's most popular and acclaimed novels, Tommy Orange's There There and Tayari Jones' An American Marriage, have long been on the list but fail to qualify for the finalist.
Aside from Wednesday's ceremony, the season of literary awards has been generally gloomy. The Nobel Prize for Literature was canceled this year due to a scandal of sexual misconduct that engulfed an influential man with close ties to the Swedish Academy. The Man Booker Award, awarded to Northern Irish artist Anna Burns for "Milkman", did not spark the buzz and controversy he had experienced in previous years. And there have been few early epic novels or furtive bestsellers around which the literary world has rallied. Fiction sales declined overall, while readers were stuck to the unprecedented cycle of news.
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