National Book Award winner
The writer wins the National Book Award for nonfiction; Adam Johnson claims the fiction prize.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is honored for “Between the World and Me.”
NEW YORK — Ta-Nehisi Coates marked another professional triumph Wednesday night by winning the National Book Award for nonfiction for “Between the World and Me,” his timely, bestselling meditation on race in America.
In an acceptance speech that prompted a standing ovation from the black tieclad crowd at Cipriani Wall Street in New York, Coates dedicated the award to Prince Jones, a Howard University classmate who was killed while unarmed by a police officer and who figures prominently in the memoir, written as a letter to Coates’ teenage son.
As Coates explained, the officer responsible for Jones’ death was never disciplined for the killing.
“I’m a black man in America. I can’t punish that officer. ‘Between the World and Me’ comes out of that place,” said Coates, a national correspondent at the Atlantic whose incisive commentary has made him a high-profile public intellectual with more than 300,000 Twitter followers (@tane-hisicoates).
“We are in this moment where folks are recording everything on their phones. Every day you turn on the TV and you see some sort of violence being directed at black people,” Coates said.
“I have waited 15 years for this moment, because when Prince Jones died, there were no cameras, there was nobody looking.”
Despite its difficult subject matter, “Between the World and Me” became a bestseller. Released in July, it has sold more than 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan, and has been met with overwhelming critical praise.
“Whenever the industry can match critical and commercial success in one book, it’s something that everybody likes to see,” said Jim Milliot, editorial director of Publishers Weekly.
The win caps off a remarkable year for Coates, who was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in September and has also been tapped to write a “Black Panther” comic series for Marvel.
Amid the Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing national conversations about race and violence, the 40-year-old has emerged as an essential voice who combines intellectual rigor with accessibility, said Rebecca Carroll, an opinion writer for the Guardian US.
“He is as brilliant and accomplished as any prestigious scholar, but he comes across as a boy from Baltimore. And he is curious, which is such a valuable thing to see, especially for young black America.”
While Coates’ victory was virtually pre-ordained, there was at least one major surprise at the event, American publishing’s biggest-ticket literary award.
In a surprising outcome, Adam Johnson claimed the award for fiction with his short story collection, “Fortune Smiles.” Johnson, who beat out such favorites as Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” and Lauren Groff’s “Fates and Furies,” appeared as stunned as anyone by the victory.
“I told my wife and my kids, ‘Don’t come across America because this is not going to happen,’ ” said Johnson, who teaches at Stanford and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son.”
Neal Shusterman won for young people’s literature for “Challenger Deep,” a novel about a teen struggling with mental illness that was inspired by his son’s experiences.
Robin Coste Lewis won the poetry prize for her debut collection, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” a reflection on the black female form.
Novelist Don DeLillo was awarded the medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. In presenting the award to DeLillo, author Jennifer Egan praised his masterful dialogue, “epic” sensibility and the “chutzpah in the sheer range of his books.”
After a standing ovation, the author of “White Noise,” “Underworld” and “Falling Man” took to the stage and spoke of the “the power of memory that a book carries with it.”
James Patterson, winner of the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, joked that as the writer of bestselling mass-market fiction in a room full of highbrow types, he was “the Big Mac at Cipriani.”