The National Book Foundation announced 2020’s National Book Award winners this week. Here’s the list…
2020 National Book Award for Fiction winner: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Judges Citation: By turns hilarious and flat-out heartbreaking, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a bright, bold, gut punch of a novel. Written in the form of a screenplay with porous boundaries, Yu’s wonderfully inventive work spotlights the welter of obstacles its everyman protagonist must confront in a profoundly racist, rigidly hierarchical world as he does his best—in the story of his own life—to land a decent role.
2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction winner: The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Tamara Payne and Les Payne
Judges Citation: Les and Tamara Payne refuse a simplistic depiction of Malcolm X, one of our greatest, and most misunderstood, Americans. Malcolm’s story — the rise from “street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary” — is as unlikely as it is profound. Incisive and comprehensive, this intensely human portrait is written with a dedicated beauty and uncompromising detail that matches Malcolm’s own life. The Dead Are Arising is the most accessible and compelling telling of it since the Autobiography.
2020 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner: King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender
Judges Citation: King and the Dragonflies hooks the reader from its first haunting sentence. Twelve-year-old King’s voice rings true and not a single line feels superfluous. Themes of toxic masculinity, racism, and self-discovery slowly come into focus as King himself begins to understand the layers of hurt and hope in this world. Kacen Callender has created a timeless story that is painfully timely—one that will lodge in your gut and grow.
2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature winner: Tokyo Ueno Station by Morgan Giles and Yu Miri
Judges Citation: This deft translation by Morgan Giles of Korean-Japanese writer Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station is a welcome and necessary addition to the translated Japanese canon, which unfolds in the memories of a deceased narrator occupying the eponymous train station. The book is an observation of Japan at the gateway of its capital, at multiple thresholds of shifting eras, told in the bardo of a mourning father and compatriot, reciting his surroundings and circumstances as if a prayer, a mantra.
2020 National Book Award for Poetry winner: DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi
Judges Citation: Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all “victims of History,” so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.