US National Book Awards 2020 winners announced

The winners of the US National Book Awards 2020 were announced in a virtual ceremony streaming online on November 18, 2020.

The US National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two-lifetime achievement awards to authors every November. The longlisted nominees for 2020 were announced in September and the shortlist revealed on October 6.

The winners for the year were announced in a virtual ceremony hosted by Jason Reynolds on November 8. The event, the last year with National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas in charge, centred Black lives with a film showing their importance to the organisation. Ms. Lucas, in an evening gown and crocs, also showed the work that they had been doing in the community during a pandemic year.

The awards handed out on the evening were fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. The African American winners of the awards were;

• Nonfiction: Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company
• Young People’s Literature: Kacen Callender, King and the Dragonflies, Scholastic Press / Scholastic Inc.
• Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Walter Mosley

Watch the two-hour ceremony in its entirety in the below video.

 

Here are images from the event last night.