NEW YORK
Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” a surreal and poetic novel about a struggling family in Mississippi, on Wednesday night won the National Book Award for fiction.
It was the second time Ward received the fiction prize: She won in 2011 for “Salvage the Bones.”
Masha Gessen’s “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia” received the nonfiction prize and Robin Benway’s “Far from the Tree” won for young people’s literature. The poetry prize was given to Frank Bidart for his career anthology “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016.” Each of the four winners received $10,000.
In a brief, emotional speech, Ward spoke of her frustration with some readers who wondered if they could connect with members of a poor black community in the South. She thanked the publishing community, and her friends and family, for their ongoing support.
“You looked at me and the people I love and write about … and you saw yourself,” she said, adding that she felt honored to reimagine and amplify the voices of those she knows back home in Mississippi.
Themes of identity and displacement were common in this year’s fiction finalists, from Elliot Ackerman’s Middle East saga “Dark at the Crossing” to Min Jin Lee’s novel of cultural conflict in Japan and Korea, “Pachinko.” Lisa Ko, whose “The Leavers” tells of a young adoptee’s divide between East and West, said that “America has always been obsessed with identity and self-definition.”
“As someone whose family has been immigrating for generations, I’m drawn to stories of survival and a search for home and belonging, and I’m interested in how expectations of assimilation have intersected with culture and policy throughout U.S. history, and at what cost, and to whom,” she told The Associated Press in a recent email. “These are evergreen themes in this country … perhaps especially resonant right now as our current administration is running on an explicitly exclusionary platform.”
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