The National Book Award is like one of those big movie awards shows, only it’s not on TV. And most people have never heard of it. Tell most people you won the National Book Award, you’ll get a blank stare. Tell them you won the Super Bowl, they’ll buy you a beer.
Here are the winners!
Louise Erdrich – she’s from Minnesota, you know – won for her novel The Round House. In nonfiction, Katherine Boo won for Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, won the nonfiction award.
And for poetry: David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations.
And for literature for young people: William Alexander for Goblin Secret. Another Minnesota writer, by the way.
Read NPR’s coverage here.