National Book Awards highlight issues of race

Imprints from Penguin Random House dominated the National Book Awards handed out Wednesday night in front of a crowd of 700 who packed into Cipriani Downtown for the awards dinner.

In a year marked by racial tension, it was no surprise that books centered on race issues drew heavy praise in both nonfiction and poetry.

Ta-Nehisi Coates was the odds-on favorite to win for his “Between the World and Me,” which was written as a memoir of the black author as if addressing his teenage son. And the judges did not disappoint the crowd, awarding Coates the award for nonfiction book of the year.

Coates, whose work was published by the Spiegel & Grau imprint of Penguin Random, drew two standing ovations.

He dedicated the book to a friend from Howard University, Prince Carmen Jones, who was killed in a police shooting in 2000.

“I’ve never met an individual who was so filled with love and compassion,” said Coates. “Prince Jones was killed because he was mistaken for a criminal.”

There were no cameras to record it and the police officer responsible was never prosecuted, Coates told the audience.

“I’ve waited 15 years for this night,” he said.

Black women in America factored into the top book for poetry, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” by Robin Coste Lewis, a debut collection published by the Knopf imprint of Penguin Random House.

One of the most emotional awards of the night came in the young adult category, which Neal Shusterman won for his novel “Challenger Deep,” from HarperCollins (owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post), about a teen’s battle with schizophrenia and depression.

Shusterman said the book was inspired by his own son Brendan’s struggle with those illnesses in his teens.

“In the depths of his illness, when he really could not tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t, he said to me, ‘Sometimes it feels like I’m at the bottom of the ocean, screaming at the top of my lungs and nobody can hear me.’ ”

“And I knew what ‘Challenger Deep’ was going to be about,” Shusterman said.

He thanked the doctor who helped save his son’s life, Robert Woods, and had Brendan come up to the stage to accept the award with him.

“Brendan, this is yours as much as it is mine,” he said.

For the second year in a row, a short story collection won in fiction.

Adam Johnson wrote “Fortune Smiles: Stories,” for Random House and his win was considered something of an upset since one of the finalists it beat out — Lauren Groff’s bestselling “Fates & Furies” — was the pre-event favorite.

Johnson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel “The Orphan Master’s Son,” seemed genuinely surprised he had won this year and sat for a few seconds after his name was announced. Once up at the dais, he admitted he had told his wife and kids not to bother coming cross country for the ceremony because “it wasn’t going to happen.”

Novelist James Patterson won the Literarian Award for his work in getting 250,000 books donated to young people over the years, while Don DeLillo took home a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.