The 2015 National Book Award winners were announced last night in New York City. The big prize for Fiction went to Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson, who is racking up the hardware after his prior book, the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, won the Pulitzer. Fortune Smiles is a collection of stories, making it two years in a row that a collection has won the NBA for fiction. As we noted in our second-half preview, this collection “of six stories, about everything from a former Stasi prison guard in East Germany to a computer programmer ‘finding solace in a digital simulacrum of the president of the United States,’ echoes [Johnson’s] early work while also building upon the ambition of his prize-winning tome.”
The Nonfiction award was yet another honor for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s lyrical open letter to his son, Between the World and Me. The book has sat atop our Top Ten list for a few months now, and Sonya Chung dissected some of the reaction to the book in her persuasive essay in August. In September, we noted (with relief) this year’s unusually diverse nonfiction longlist.
The Poetry award was won by Robin Coste Lewis for Voyage of the Sable Venus. The winner in the Young People’s Literature category was Neal Shusterman for Challenger Deep.
Bonus Links: Earlier in the year we dove into both the Shortlist and the Longlist to share excerpts and reviews where available.
