At the National Book Awards on Wednesday evening, Rabih Alameddine won the prize for fiction for his novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove). In his remarks, Alameddine spoke briefly about Palestine and the brutality of ICE, and also noted that writers “might not always understand the system that sustains us but we appreciate it.” The nonfiction prize went to Omar El Akkad for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. “It’s very difficult to think in the celebratory terms, a book that was written in response to a genocide,” he said […]
