The National Book Awards were announced last night, in a celebration that some call the book world’s equivalent of Oscar night.

The winners were “Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward in fiction; “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” in non-fiction; “Head Off and Split” by Nikky Finney in poetry; and “Inside Out and Back Again” by Thanhha Lai in the young adult category.

As you know if you’ve been reading this blog, last year’s fiction winner — “Lord of Misrule” by Jaimy Gordon — was set in West Virginia. I don’t think any of this year’s winners have any direct connection to the Mountain State. But the poetry winner, Nikki Finney, is an Affrilachian poet (and a professor at the University of Kentucky). And the fiction winner, “Salvage the Bones,” did draw a comparison to Buckhannon native Jayne Anne Phillips’ “Lark and Termite” (a National Book Award finalist in 2009) from Washington Post book critic Ron Charles.

I was sort of expecting “The Tiger’s Wife” by Tea Obreht, a Yugoslavia native now living in the United States, to win the fiction prize; she’d already won the British Orange Prize for fiction by a woman. I didn’t know much about Ward’s novel, but now I’ll have to read that.

I really enjoyed Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare, “Will in the World,” so “The Swerve” was already on my list to read — even though Michael Dirda, my favorite book critic, wasn’t crazy about the book. He called it “a book that feels a little mushy and over-sweetened, in the way of so much popular history with an eye on the bestseller list.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Events, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.