At the 71st National Book Awards on Wednesday evening, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (Pantheon) won the fiction prize. Roxane Gay presented the award, noting, “This has been an impossible year in almost every way. We are dealing with both a pandemic and a political climate that is terrifying and absurd.” Yu, who said he had not prepared a speech because he was so sure he would not win, spoke briefly, saying “I can’t feel anything in my body right now” and “I’m going to go melt into a puddle.” (Afterwards on Twitter, Yu remarked: “That feeling when you win a @nationalbook award and forget to thank your family.”)
Les Payne and Tamara Payne’s The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright) took the nonfiction prize. Tamara Payne accepted the award, saying,”This is such a bittersweet moment. I really wish my father was here for this.” (He died in 2018, and she completed the book.) She added, “Today we see the youth all over the world continue to embrace [Malcolm X], because his message still rings true.”
The poetry award went to Don Mee Choi for DMZ Colony (Wave Books). “This award is for my father,” she said. “Poetry and translation have changed my life. For me they are inseparable.” She urged the audience to “be on the side of the struggle of those sat upon here and abroad.”
Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (Riverhead), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles, won the prize for Translated Literature. “It is a very difficult work to translate,” said Miri while accepting the award. “And Tokyo Ueno Station is the first novel that Morgan translated. I want to sing her praises.” She added, “It is a shame that we can’t be together…I’d like to give her a high five and a hug.” For her part, Giles said, “I have to thank you, Miri, for trusting me, a first time translator.”
The prize for Young People’s Literature went to Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies (Scholastic Press). In their speech, Callender described 2020 as “the hardest, most painful, most devastating year in people’s lifetime,” but expressed hope that the upcoming generations of young people will be the ones to change the world. They pointed to the “the necessary balance between pain and hope and joy” in literature and life, noting, “This has been a difficult year, but I’m grateful for this joyful moment.”
The themes of the evening were Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Walter Mosley accepted the award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and spoke movingly about being the first Black man to receive it: “One might ask, can such a thing make a difference?” He concluded, “I prefer to believe we are on the threshold of a new day…We’ve been here from the beginning and we’ll be here at the end, our heads held high when equality has been achieved.”
Outgoing executive director Lisa Lucas gave remarks following a video tribute to Black authors, saying that “2020 has been a challenging year for all of us and our book community.” She continued, “The ways that this year has tested us proves that we’re capable of imagining solutions to unprecedented problems…. We can do better. We know that we can do better.”
The ceremony concluded with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats performing his song “This Year.” “I’m gonna make it through this year,” he sang, “if it kills me.”