NEW YORK — National Book Awards judges honored authors worldwide last Wednesday night, from Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine’s “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)” to Chicago-born poet Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder.”
Alameddine’s narrative of intense family bonds within the chaos of modern Lebanon received the fiction prize, while Smith, who has received numerous previous awards for her lyricism and intensity, won for poetry. The nonfiction prize was given to Egyptian Canadian novelist-journalist Omar El Akkad for his fierce indictment of the contemporary West, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.”
Iranian American Daniel Nayeri’s “The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story” won for young people’s literature and Argentine Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s “We Are Green and Trembling,” translated from Spanish by Robin Myers, was cited for translated literature.
The awards have often served as a kind of counter voice to current events. The night’s honorees expressed gratitude for prizes bestowed and for literature itself, and horror and disenchantment at the political and social climate, from immigration raids in the U.S. by masked agents to the carnage in the Middle East.
“I’m going to speak in Spanish because there are fascists who don’t like that,” Cabezón Cámara said, her words translated on stage by Myers.
Alameddine’s speech, like his novel, combined humor and agony. He began with a lament for the bombing of a Palestinian refugee camp but went on to joke about the demands of his agent, Nicole Aragi, and thank everyone from his gastrointestinal doctor to the “psychiatrist who has been telling me to get over myself for more than 20 years.”
Honorary awards were presented to fiction writer George Saunders and author-publisher-mentor Roxane Gay.
Saunders, widely praised for his legacy of dark humor and warm compassion, was this year’s recipient of the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, previously given to Toni Morrison and Robert Caro among others. He remembered his early growth as a writer, and how revision changed him on the page and in real life, a “truth-seeking” process that sets the artist apart from the dictator and other bullies.
“We’re open to finding out how things actually are, not how we think they are, not how we wish they are, but how they actually are,” he said. “And this puts us in a less delusional relation to reality.”
Gay, given the Literarian medal for her contributions to the book community, noted that writing was a solitary endeavor but that sharing the word was a different challenge. She cited proudly her history of publishing and promoting diverse voices, mocked the idea that “straight white men just can’t catch a break” and urged the industry to change.
“There is room for all of our voices and there are people in this very room who have the power to do better,” she told the audience. “You have the power to abandon old ways of thinking and nonsense metrics like social media followings as a determining factor in buying a manuscript.”
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