"The story of a poor black family struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina has won the National Book Award for fiction.
Jesmyn Ward's second novel Salvage the Bones beat books including Téa Obrecht's Orange prize-winning title The Tiger's Wife to win the prestigious US prize, worth $10,000 (£6,300) and won in the past by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon. Set in Mississippi, in the coastal town of Bois Sauvage just before Katrina hits, Salvage the Bones tells of Esch, 15 and pregnant, and her three brothers as they search for food and try to protect each other.
Ward, who was in Mississippi herself when Katrina hit, wanted to write 'about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South,' the Associated Press reported. Her own experience of the hurricane was 'traumatic … to say the least,' she added. 'We went out into the storm, sheltered in our cars for hours, were denied shelter by a white family who told us we could sit outside in their field but couldn't shelter in their house, and then made our way to an intersection where another family, again white, took us in,' she said." — Alison Flood, Guardian
Read more...
"Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction Wednesday. The poetry prize went to Nikki Finney's Head Off & Split, summation of African-American history from slavery to Katrina, while Thanhhai Lai's Inside Out & Back Again, the story of a Vietnamese family in Alabama, won for young people's literature at a time when the state is reconsidering sweeping anti-immigration laws that went into effect in September." — Huffington Post
Read more...
Buy all these books here...
No comments:
Post a Comment