The National Book Awards Winners: A Retrospective

I expected to find, if not this specific list, something similar to it. To be more direct, I didn’t expect to find a Black or Brown face amongst the inaugural winners, knowing they were awarded in 1950—the dawn of that era certain people like to idealize because the country unapologetically rallied around white masculinity. I can’t say for certain, but I’d wager that nobody at the Foundation was concerned about the homogeneity of this list when it was decided.

I say this to say it was ultimately the question of who was telling these Important stories that contributed to urgent national discussions that dogged me as I perused the archive of winners. What seems obvious today—that it’s not just about what’s being said of our lives and times but who’s doing the speaking that matters—wasn’t always a significant part of the conversation, if it was part of the convo at all. After reviewing the first winners, I found myself scanning the years to see when women and BIPOC authors appeared.

Two(!!) women received awards in 1952 when Rachel L. Carson and Marianne Moore made the list for The Sea Around Us and Collected Poems, respectively. In 1953, Ralph Ellison, a scholar with a name (Ralph Waldo Ellison) incidentally hearkening to the subject of the first nonfiction book to win an award, became the first BIPOC author to make the list for his enduring classic, Invisible Man.

In Richard Kostelanetz’s interview with Ellison, the author said:

I write what my imagination throws up to me and I must feed this back through my own critical sensibility. That critical sensibility is informed by a sense of life which grows in its immediacy out of my being part of the Negro American group.

If I’m being honest, and thanks to previous perusals of old literary awards lists, I did not expect to find a book informed by the African American experience and written by an African American author on the list of winners a handful of years after the inaugural awards. That said, white men continued to dominate the fiction category, with white women coming in second, and, interestingly, BIPOC women coming in third. Jesmyn Ward is the only woman and only BIPOC author to win the award twice, for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).

Looking at the nonfiction winners, I’d say it wasn’t until Joan Didion was awarded for The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005 that we saw that list become more inclusive, but BIPOC authors—specifically Black authors—are crowded into more recent years with:

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (2016)
• The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (2018)
• The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (2019)
• The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (2020)
• All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles (2021)
• South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon To Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry (2022)

Huh! It’s almost like some sort of recognition dawned… Masha Gessens’s win for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia in 2017 looks like an outlier—albeit a prescient one—in these tail years.

My final note on the nonfiction list is that you can certainly find white authors on non-white cultures listed among the winners in earlier years, and I well remember the days when those were the authors you’d find dominating conversations on race, slavery, and non-Western people and cultures.

In the poetry category, you’ll see a lot of the same patterns. Ai and Lucille Clifton were rare ones with back-to-back wins for Black women with Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999) and Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (2000), respectively. There is no obvious dawning of recognition here as there is with nonfiction, but this is where it really occurred to me that all of the categories have a long way to go when it comes to championing works that truly represent the diversity of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer people.

The category that does this best is Young People’s Literature and it’s telling that that list wasn’t introduced until 1996.

All you really have to do to get a sense of time passing and put a finger to the pulse of national conversations considered important to a literary crowd is peruse the covers curated to represent each year’s winners. While some years gave me that distinct “you had to be there” beffudlement, the selections by and large told a story that tracked with history. Needless to say, the tastemakers or curators—the NBA’s judges—play a big part. They are “distinguished writers, translators, critics, librarians, and booksellers,” and they bring their own biases, experiences, and concerns into the selection process, so who will win isn’t always obvious. And yet I ask you—

Who Will Win This Year?

I invite you to explore the list of past winners yourself and make your own observations. Once you’ve done that, find descriptions of this year’s finalists here and predict who you think will win for each category (or, hell, just have fun and choose based on gut instinct or who you want to win!). After the winners are announced on November 15th, we’ll come back and see how we did.