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1950 National Book Award Winners:
William Carlos William (left),
Nelson Algren (second from right),
and Ralph L. Rusk (far right),
with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt
at the first National Book Awards Ceremony.
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The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America. For more about the history of this award, visit the National Book Award.
And this year's winners are:
- THE ROUND HOUSE by Louise Erdrich (Fiction)... When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, fourteen-year old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family
- BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS by Katherine Boo (Non-Fiction)... The dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century's great, unequal cities. In this fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human. Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees fortune in the recyclable garbage of richer people. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a rural childhood, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to good times. But then, as the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths,the true contours of a competitive age are revealed.
- GOBLIN SECRETS by William Alexander (Young People's Literature)... Hoping to find his lost brother, Rownie escapes the home of the witch Graba and joins a troupe of goblins who perform in Zombay, a city where humans are forbidden to wear masks and act in plays.
- BEWILDERMENT: NEW POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS by David Ferry (Poetry)
