The winners of the 2006 National Book Awards have been announced. A year after William T. Vollmann won the fiction award it has gone to Richard Powers for The Echo Maker (excerpt), marking a shift in focus (though perhaps not yet a “trend”) toward honoring some of the names on the leading edge of American fiction. The New York Times, in its writeup, mentions that “as in recent years, the fiction category raised eyebrows in the publishing industry for its lack of commercially known nominees in a year of big-name authors,” but I don’t recall hearing much rumbling about the nominees. If anything, as I wrote when the nominees were announced, this year’s nominees “satisfyingly occupy the sweet spot between obscurity and being, well, too obvious.” And if one looks at the bodies of work of the five nominees, as well as their literary reputations, Powers was certainly deserving of this plaudit. Judging on his book alone, from what I’ve heard, he is a worthy winner, as well.
In nonfiction, the award went to Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (excerpt) taking on a very important topic in American history that hasn’t gotten much attention from the writers of popular history. The Young People’s Literature award was given to M.T. Anderson for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party (excerpt), sparing us the possibility of an angry backlash against those darn graphic novels. And for Poetry, the award was given to Nathaniel Mackey for Splay Anthem (poem).
