In a night that blended literary triumph with raw political outrage, the 76th National Book Awards honoured five exceptional authors while transforming the stage into a platform of resistance against genocide, fascism and systemic injustice, according to Associated Press.
Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine won the fiction prize for "The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)", a searing portrait of family bonds amid Lebanon’s chaos. Chicago poet Patricia Smith took home the poetry award for "The Intentions of Thunder", while Canadian-Iranian writer Omar El Akkad claimed nonfiction for "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This", a critique of the West written in response to the war in Gaza.
Iranian-American Daniel Nayeri won the young people’s literature prize for "The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story", and Argentine author Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers, received the translated literature prize for "We Are Green and Trembling".
Each winner pocketed $10,000, but the evening at Cipriani Wall Street belonged less to celebration and more to conscience.
Accepting her award, Cabezón Cámara declared in Spanish:
“I’m going to speak in Spanish because there are fascists who don’t like that.”
Omar El Akkad was unflinching:
“It’s very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide (in Gaza). It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body.”
Rabih Alameddine mixed grief with dark humour, mourning the bombing of a Palestinian refugee camp before thanking his “psychiatrist who has been telling me to get over myself for more than 20 years.”
Patricia Smith delivered a tear-streaked litany of the racial barriers she has faced, hailing poetry as her route to transcendence.
Honorary medals went to fiction master George Saunders, who described the writer’s duty as staying “open to finding out how things actually are, not how we think they are, not how we wish they are, but how they actually are,” and to author-publisher Roxane Gay, who told the packed room of industry leaders, “There is room for all of our voices and there are people in this very room who have the power to do better… You have the power to abandon old ways of thinking and nonsense metrics like social media followings as a determining factor in buying a manuscript.”
Gay also skewered the tired complaint that “straight white men just can’t catch a break.”
Hosted by actor Jeff Heller and opened by Corinne Bailey Rae’s soulful performance, the ceremony, often dubbed the Oscars of American publishing, felt this year like literature’s answer to a world on fire.
