Jesmyn Ward and Stephen Greenblatt, stand amid as the winners of National Book Award

Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday for ‘Salvage the Bones’. The book tells a story about a poor Mississippi family, which faced the rage of Hurricane Katrina. While, Stephen Greenblatt won the nonfiction prize for "The Swerve:
How the World Became Modern”. The recognition is entitled as the most prestigious in U.S. publishing. The awards were presented by the ‘National Book Foundation’ at the 62nd annual awards, on Wednesday, 16 November, in New York.

Jesmyn Ward, a young writer, was accredited for her second book, published by Bloomsbury USA. The book was narrated through the voice of a pregnant black teenager. The ingression of writing for ‘Salvage the Bones’ was a reaction to her brother’s death. Ward
told "I wanted to do something with my time here that would have meaning. This is a life’s work, and I am only at the beginning”.

Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘The Swerve’, revolves around the 15th-century rediscovery of an ancient Roman epic by Lucretius, which subsequently fuelled the Renaissance and inspired great minds from Galileo to Freud. Greenblatt’s work was notified as ‘a work of
intelligence, generosity and passion’.

The book, published by W.W. Norton & Company, garnered a series of approbation, as a Harvard professor remarked the book has crossed the depiction and expressing power of books, moreover, it shows a remarkable scenario of distance, time and space.

University of Kentucky creative writing professor Nikky Finney won the poetry prize for "Head Off & Split". The book shows a wallowing forefront of African-American life from Rosa Parks to Condoleezza Rice, Katrina and family weddings.

After receiving the award, Finney delivered a poetic speech, to which actor John Lithgow, the show’s host stated "the best acceptance speech for anything that I’ve heard in my entire life."

The young people’s literature prize went to Thanhha Lai for "Inside Out & Back Again". Her work was a novel-in-verse which reflected her experience, fleeing Saigon with her family during the Vietnam War and settling in Alabama.

Mitchell Kaplan received, ‘the Literarian Award for outstanding service to the literary community’ by Walter Mosley, who is co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International, the nation’s largest book fair.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=4006

Posted by Melvin Arthur on Nov 18 2011. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry