Revisiting Hidden Pasts at the National Book Awards
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The National Book Awards, a glitzy affair otherwise known as the Oscars for book nerds, took place on Wednesday night. One overwhelming motif pulsed through nearly all of the winning books: the will of marginalized people to have their suppressed stories heard and acknowledged. The winner in the nonfiction category was Ned Blackhawk’s , a radical retelling of history from a Native American perspective. Craig Santos Perez, an Indigenous Chamorro writer from Guam, won the poetry prize for his collection . At the end,” about wanting young Indigenous people from his island to understand all the ways their history had actually been preserved despite not being taught in school: “Our ancestors tattooed their skin with defiant / scripts of intricately inked genealogy, stories / of plumage and pain.” The translated-literature prize went to Stênio Gardel, a Brazilian writer, for his novel, , about an elderly gay man, illiterate for most of his life and from an impoverished area of Brazil, who finally learns to read and can piece together the story of his own youthful, illicit love affair. But the book that best demonstrated the night’s strong preference for works that deal with stifled or erased histories was Justin Torres’s , which won the fiction award. Tope Folarin’s , published this week in , homes in on this theme.
