Diversity was very much the dominant theme of the first-ever virtual National Book Awards Wednesday night with Walter Mosley being granted the lifetime achievement award and the individual book wins dominated by minority authors.
“This is our night,” quipped “All American Boys” author Jason Reynolds, who hosted the event from Washington D.C.
The closely watched award for fiction went to Charles Yu’s satiric novel “Interior Chinatown,” about a young actor who yearns to be the “Kung Fu guy” in films, but instead is given minor stereotypical roles such as pizza delivery guy. The novel was written in the form of a screenplay.
“By turns hilarious and flat-out heartbreaking, Charles Yu’s ‘Interior Chinatown‘ is a bright, bold, gut punch of a novel,” said the judges’ statement.
Yu, accepting the award on camera, appeared stunned.
“I can’t feel anything in my body right now. I prepared nothing, which tells you about how realistic I thought this was,” he said. “I will probably just stop talking now,” he concluded. “I’m going to go melt into a puddle right now.”
The top prize for nonfiction went to the late Newsday columnist and editor Les Payne and his daughter Tamara for “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X.”
“I wish my father was here to accept this award,” she said. He died in 2018.
Don Mee Choi’s “DMZ Colony” won the poetry prize; Yu Miri’s “Tokyo Ueno Station,” translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles, won the translated literature prize; Giles spent three years translating and it was her major translation. “Thank you for letting me translate your beautiful novel,” Giles said to Miri, who also appeared on camera.
Kacen Callender’s “King and the Dragonflies” won the young people’s literature prize. “As an author, I always try to balance between pain, hope and joy,” Callender said.
Walter Mosley, author of “The Devil in a Blue Dress” and other tomes in a lifetime of writing over 60 fiction and nonfiction books, was given the Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters and struck a somber note.
“People darker than blue built this country brick-by-brick,” said Mosley, “We were here when it started and we’ll be here when it ends.” He was the first black man to receive the award.
“There’s a great weight hanging over the reception of an award when the underlying subject is the first black man to receive it,” Mosley said. “I prefer to believe that we are on the threshold of a new day, that this evening is but one of 10,000 steps being taken to recognize the potential of this nation.”
The event ran video of the late Congressman John Lewis who was given the Young Adult in literature award in 2016 and recalled that when he was a kid, he could not get a library card because he was black.
It then ran a video in support of Black Lives Matter, narrated by last year’s Book Awards host LeVar Burton.
The Foundation’s executive director Lisa Lucas is one of several black executives recruited to head publishing imprints in recent months. She’ll become publisher in January of Pantheon and Schocken imprints at Penguin Random House. “We’re capable of imagining the solutions to unprecedented problems,” she said of the literary world, speaking from the children’s book section from a library in Los Angeles. “We can do much better.”
Carolyn Reidy, the late CEO of Simon & Schuster, was given posthumously the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, which was accepted by her husband Stephen Reidy.
Many of her authors spoke of her contributions. “She knew about something larger than herself,” said Walter Isaacson, a long time S&S author who wrote the bestselling Steve Jobs bio. “She knew the most basic concept that we’re here for a short while and we have to make it about something larger than ourselves.”