2016 National Book Award Winners Announced

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The 2016 National Book Awards for fiction, nonfiction, young people’s literature, and poetry were announced in a ceremony on Wednesday night, November 16, in New York City.

National Book Award winner medallionThe National Book Foundation (NBF) live-streamed the ceremony, hosted by comedian Larry Wilmore at Cipriani Wall Street, on Facebook, Twitter, and the NBF website. The entire ceremony is currently available to watch online.

The winners of the 67th annual awards are:

Fiction

  • The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, Penguin Random House)

Nonfiction

  • Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi (Nation Books)

Young People’s Literature

Poetry

Making this year’s awards unique, winners in three of the four categories — fiction, nonfiction, and young people’s literature — are African American. This is also the first time that a graphic novel (March: Book Three) has won a National Book Award.

Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad was a September 2016 Indie Next List pick.

To be eligible for a 2016 National Book Award, a book must have been written by a U.S. citizen and published in the United States between December 1, 2015, and November 30, 2016. A group of judges, consisting of authors, critics, librarians, and booksellers, announced the list of finalists on October 6.

Two other awards were presented at the ceremony attended by more than 700 guests: the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which went to Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro, and the NBF’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, which was presented to Cave Canem, a writer’s center that promotes the work of African American poets and writers.

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