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Sigrid Nunez Wins 2018 National Book Award for ‘The Friend’

Sigrid Nunez accepting her award.Credit...Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

• Sigrid Nunez won the fiction prize for “The Friend.”

• Jeffrey C. Stewart won the prize for nonfiction for his book about the philosopher Alain Locke, and Justin Phillip Reed’s “Indecency” won the prize for Poetry.

Yoko Tawada and her translator, Margaret Mitsutani, won the award for Translated Literature for the novel “The Emissary,” and Elizabeth Acevedo’s “The Poet X” won for Young People’s Literature.

• Chilean novelist Isabel Allende accepted the foundation’s lifetime achievement award.

Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for fiction for her novel, “The Friend,” which centers on a lonely writer who loses her best friend to suicide and finds comfort in caring for his Great Dane.

A sometimes acerbic meditation on loss and love, the novel was among this year’s critical favorites — the Times’ critic Dwight Garner called it “dry, allusive and charming,” noting that when the fragile writer adopts the large, lumbering dog, “the comedy here writes itself.”

“The Friend” also resonated with critics and judges this year perhaps because of its subtle exploration of sexual harassment: The writer’s deceased friend was a prominent writer who leveraged his fame to have inappropriate relationships with his young students.

In their citation, the judges called “The Friend” an “exquisitely written and deeply humane exploration of grief, literature and memory.”

This year’s fiction finalists included an eclectic mix of experimental works from independent publishing houses like Soho Press and Graywolf, and writing by established novelists like Lauren Groff and Rebecca Makkai.

Some of the biggest surprises in the fiction category this year involved not the five writers who made the shortlist, but the critical and commercial darlings who were overlooked. Two of this year’s most popular and acclaimed novels, “There There” by Tommy Orange and “An American Marriage” by Tayari Jones, were longlisted but failed to make the finalist cut.

Nunez, author of the novels “Salvation City,” “The Last of Her Kind,” “A Feather on the Breath of God” and “For Rouenna,” among others, spoke in her acceptance speech about how writers are able to find meaning in pain and emotional hardship because suffering and loss can generate great literature.

“However dreadful, it may be of use,” she said.

In “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke,” Stewart drew on vast research into Locke and his contemporaries, Jazz Age luminaries and prominent African-American artists, dancers, dramatists and novelists.

In his acceptance speech, Stewart recognized Locke’s struggles as a closeted gay man, noting that he created a community of artists as his family.

“If he was here right now accepting this award, he wouldn’t have family with him, as a gay man who lived a closeted life,” he said.

In recent years, the nonfiction category, like everything else in culture these days, has taken on pointed political overtones, populated with books about racism, mass incarceration and the rise of the religious and political right. This year’s finalists were a bit more thematically diverse. In addition to Stewart’s biography of Alain Locke, there was also a biography of the botanist David Hosack (Victoria Johnson’s “American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic”) and Adam Winkler’s “We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights,” a history of how corporations gained power and influence in the United States, shaping national policies to grant companies rights that are comparable to those of individuals.

Some of the nominated books speak to our current politics and the growing cultural, political and class divide between rural and urban America, most notably Sarah Smarsh’s “Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth,” which chronicles her childhood in Kansas, where she grew up in a white working-class family, and addresses how poverty can trap people across generations.

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Justin Phillip Reed accepts the National Book Award for Poetry.Credit...Bryan Thomas for The New York Times

Justin Phillip Reed’s collection “Indecency,” which grapples with themes of masculinity, sexuality, exploitation and racism, won the prize for poetry.

The judges praised the collection as a “formally explosive” work that makes “intimacy both refuge and weapon.”

Reed, who was born and raised in South Carolina, has published in the Kenyon Review, the African American Review and elsewhere.

“I meditated on the courage it might take to feel worthy of this,” he said as he accepted his award.

Among the other poetry finalists were Rae Armantrout’s “Wobble,” Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “Ghost Of” and Jenny Xie’s “Eye Level.”

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“The Emissary” wins for Translated Literature.

This novel, “The Emissary,” by Yoko Tawada and translated by Margaret Mitsutani, won for translated literature. It is set in near future Japan in a world in which the boundaries between generations blur. Children become infirm while older people become robust. It centers on a boy who lives with his grandfather. The judges’ citation praised the book for being “playful, powerful and wise,” and for imagining a novel in which “boundaries between species, families and genders blur and reconfigure.”

Tawada wasn’t there to receive the award, but sent a statement thanking the National Book Foundation for restoring the prize in translation: “Translation gives a book wings to fly across national borders,” she wrote.

The award for works in translation was added this year, marking the first time in decades that the foundation has recognized literature beyond the borders of the United States.

The foundation’s board unanimously voted to add the prize, which is given jointly to authors and translators, and recognizes fiction and nonfiction works by living authors who are published in the United States. (International authors who write in English are not eligible.)

“This is an opportunity for us to influence how visible books in translation are,” Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, told The Times when the prize was announced. “The less we know about the rest of the world, the worse off we are.”

The addition of the translation prize marks a departure from the National Book Awards’ original mission of celebrating “The Best of American Literature,” but many in the literary world have cheered the broadening of the awards as a necessary corrective to the often parochial attitude of American readers and publishers toward works in translation.

It also restores a prize that was eliminated in 1986, when the foundation had a slew of categories that it felt diluted the significance of the awards, among them were prizes for books about science, philosophy and religion, history and biography, arts and letters, contemporary thought, autobiography, first novel.

By also recognizing translators as co-creators, the awards are highlighting an often overlooked art form. This year’s five finalists included writers and translators from several continents, among them Olga Tokarczuk, “Flights” translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft; Négar Djavadi, “Disoriental”, translated from French by Tina Kover, and Hanne Ørstavik, “Love”, translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken.

One of the nominated translators was a well known and celebrated novelist in her own right: the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri, who translated the Italian writer Domenico Starnone’s novel “Trick.”

Elizabeth Acevedo’s “The Poet X”, a novel written in verse, about a 15-year-old girl from an observant Dominican family in Harlem who is navigating the perils of adolescence and finding solace in her poetry notebook, won the award for Young People’s Literature.

In an emotional acceptance speech, Acevedo thanked her agent and her editor, “who let me use the language that was authentic to what I needed to say.” She noted that as a Latina author, she often feels an additional burden to prove herself.

“I walk through the world with a chip in my shoulder,” she said. “I go into so many spaces where I feel like I have to prove that I’m allowed to be in that place.”

She reserved her most heartfelt thanks for her readers, children who approach her and say they’d never seen characters whose lives reflect their own in a book before.

In recognizing “The Poet X,” which blends poetry and prose, the judges highlighted how innovative children’s literature has become.

Some of the most groundbreaking authors at work today write for children and young adults, and the scope and depth of contemporary children’s literature was on display in the work of the five finalists. In “The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge,” M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin adopt a novel story-telling device — the tale unfolds from two different perspectives of a goblin and an elf, one in prose, and one in illustrations that resemble medieval woodcuts. A critic for The Times called the book “both moving and hilarious.” The graphic novelist Jarrett J. Krosoczka was nominated for “Hey, Kiddo,” a poignant and honest graphic memoir about growing up as the son of a heroin addict.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende accepted the foundation’s lifetime achievement award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, becoming the first Spanish-language author to ever receive the prize, which has gone to such influential writers as Stephen King, John Updike, Toni Morrison and Tom Wolfe. Allende became a global literary star when her first novel, “The House of Spirits,” was published in 1982. She has gone on to write more than 20 works that have collectively sold more than 70 million copies.

The novelist Luis Alberto Urrea introduced Ms. Allende, citing her profound influence on him and praising her for writing fearlessly in the face of dictatorships and political oppression.

“In despotic times she speaks of human hope,” he said. “If dictators like Chile’s Pinochet could not silence these kinds of voices, could not stop the words, then what Isabel does is a calling to us to be bolder.”

“You can’t build a wall to keep them out. You can’t lock them up,” he said. “She has taught us that words have wings.”

In her speech, Allende said she was accepting the award on “behalf of millions of people like myself who have come to this country in search of a new life.” She denounced the rise of “nationalism and racism” in our current political discourse, and spoke about the power of literature to forge understanding across cultures and nationalities.

“The values and principles that sustain our civilization are under siege,” she said. “If we listen to another person’s story, if we tell our own story, we start to heal from division and hatred.”

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