Congratulations to the winners of this year’s National Book Awards.
Fiction
The 2019 winner is Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.
In their first term at a highly competitive performing arts high school, two students, Sarah and David, fall deeply and obsessively in love. Under the care of their magnetic and manipulative drama instructor Mr. Kingsley, they and their peers exist in a rarefied bubble, where the boundaries between students and teachers become first dangerously blurred, and then completely broken.
Nonfiction
The 2019 winner is The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighbourhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. The Yellow House tells a hundred years of Broom’s family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologised cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home – only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map by Hurricane Katrina.
Poetry
The 2019 winner is Sight Lines by Arthur Sze.
In this new work, Arthur Sze employs a wide range of voices – from lichen on a ceiling to a man behind on his rent – and his mythic imagination continually evokes how humans are endangering the planet; yet, balancing rigour with passion, he seizes the significant and luminous and transforms these moments into riveting and enduring poetry.
Translated Literature
The 2019 winner is Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, which has been translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet.
Nearing the end of his life, Baron Bela Wenckheim decides to return to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence.
Young People’s Literature
The 2019 winner is 1919: The Year That Changed America by Martin W. Sandler.
1919 was a world-shaking year. America was recovering from WWI with black soldiers returning to violent racism. The suffrage movement had a long-fought win when women gained the right to vote, labourers took to the streets to protest working conditions, nationalistic fervour led to a communism scare, and prohibition went into effect. In this gripping work, Sandler examines the pinnacle events of this year and their relevance to significant issues in American life today.
