Names and faces
■ The Screen Actors Guild has selected Dame Helen Mirren as their 57th Life Achievement Award Recipient, the union said Thursday. The 76-year-old English stage and screen actor has credits spanning more than 50 years and has played everything from a gangster’s girlfriend in “The Long Good Friday” to Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen.” Mirren will be adding this latest honor to a robust collection of awards including an Oscar, a Tony, and multiple SAG, Emmy and BAFTA Awards. “I am honored to have been chosen to receive the SAG Life Achievement Award,” Mirren said in a statement. “Since I was a young actor starting out, I have always been inspired by and learned from American screen acting, so this award is particularly meaningful for me.” With 13 SAG Awards nominations and five wins, Mirren is also the most decorated SAG Life Achievement recipient, the union said. “Dame Helen Mirren is quite simply a brilliant and luminous talent,” said SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher, in a statement. “She has set the bar very high for all actors and, in role after role, she exceeds even her own extraordinary performances. I’ve always felt a kinship with Helen. She’s the Queen of England and I’m the Queen of Queens. She won an Oscar and I’m left-hander of the year. It’s uncanny.” The 28th annual SAG Awards will be broadcast live from Santa Monica, Calif. on Feb. 27.
■ Jason Mott’s “Hell of a Book,” a surreal meta-narrative about an author’s promotional tour and his haunted past and present, has won the National Book Award for fiction — a plot twist Mott did not imagine for himself. “Hell of a Book” is a satirical take on a Black writer’s adventures on the road for a promotional tour — Mott himself had his share of experiences while talking up such previous works as his debut novel “The Returned” — and a stark and disorienting tale of racial violence and identity, drawing on recent headlines and the author’s childhood. “I would like to dedicate this award to all the other mad kids, to all the outsiders, the weirdos, the bullied, the ones so strange they had no choice but to be misunderstood by the world and those around them,” Mott, 43, said in his acceptance speech. Tiya Miles’ “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake” was the winner for nonfiction. Malinda Lo’s “Last Night at the Telegraph Club” — a story of same-sex, cross-cultural love set in the 1950s — won for young people’s literature. The poetry prize was awarded to Martin Espada’s “Floaters,” and best translation went to Elisa Shua Dusapin’s “Winter in Sokcho,” translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Winners in the competitive categories awarded in a virtual ceremony Wednesday each receive $10,000.