This year’s 75th National Book Awards ceremony, held on November 20 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York, opened not with words but with music. To kick off proceedings, bandleader Jon Batiste took the stage, playfully tooted into a melodica, then sat at the Steinway and stretched Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony beautifully past recognition, adding “250 years of music” to it— stylings listeners might associate more with Stevie Wonder, or John Luther Adams—as the assembled guests from across the book business tapped utensil to plate, providing percussion.
Batiste ceded the spotlight to longtime Saturday Night Live cast member Kate McKinnon, the evening’s host. “I’m a book awards virgin, so be gentle,” she joked before opening her remarks, appropriately for 2024, with a bit about AI. “Books do more than entertain—they illuminate, they provoke, and, most importantly, they inspire change,” she said. “That was written by CHatGPT. Is that bad?”
Noting that she had “joined the literary world this year” with her middle grade debut, The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science, McKinnon took an earnest turn: “Ultimately, we tell stories because we want to help,” she said. “A book is an offering, a hand in the darkness, a way of saying, I know isn’t this crazy. And that is something that a robot will never be able to do.”
The first award of the evening, and the first of two pre-announced lifetime achievement awards, was the 2024 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the Literary Community, awarded to Black Classics Press publisher Paul Coates. Initially set to be presented by Coates’s son, Ta-Nehisi, the award was instead introduced by author Walter Mosley, who did the same for Coates earlier this year for another lifetime achievement award: the Authors Guild’s 2024 Publisher Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.
“Paul shares information that every man, woman, and most especially every child in America, and therefore the world, must know if they want their souls to survive,” Mosley said, calling him a publisher “who will publish you when he is flush and when he is broke” and “the only Black publisher in America who still prints his own books, because he would not let our truths be bought out from us or sabotaged.” He added: “Paul Coates, the warrior publisher, cannot be bought out or put out of business—how many of us can say that?”
Coates immediately ceded the spotlight to call attention to the work of the late Glenn Thompson, cofounder of the Writers and Readers Cooperative, who “was half crazy” and dedicated his life, as Coates has, to Black book publishing. Providing a broad overview of Black literary and publishing history from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X, Coates noted: “It took me a while to figure out, because I am a late-coming follower, that I am also in that tradition. My mission is recovery, and making Black self-narrating voices known to the world. I am not an interpreter. I prefer to let those voices speak to the next generations for themselves.”
Coates continued: “The more obscure they are, the more important they are in my quest. Those voices are all Black classics to me.” He added: “If those voices are not present, the result is a drab, washed-out monotone of history, and a narration where some awful person steps up and insists that slavery was a necessary experience that taught black people many valued skills. I can’t let that happen.”
National Book Foundation board chairman David Steinberger then took the mic, joking with Hachette Book Group CEO David Shelley, who took over management of the company last year in addition to his position as CEO of Hachette UK. “I understand that, in the U.K., 75 years is not that big a deal,” Steinberger said. “But here in the United States of America, 75 years is a really big deal. And to get to 75 years, you need a lot of help from a lot of people—so I get to say thank you.”
The second lifetime achievement award of the evening was the 2024 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented to author Barbara Kingsolver. The award was introduced by Sam Stoloff, president and principal of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, and Kingsolver’s agent.
Stoloff began with a tribute to the late Frances Goldin, who was Kingsolver’s first agent, and admitted to some nerves: “We agents are more used to hiding comfortably in the acknowledgments section of our authors’ books.” He praised Kingsolver for having “always been ahead of her time," reviving the social novel at a time when ironic detachment and introspection were still very much the literary fashion… [and] writing fiction about climate change before cli-fi was a thing.” He concluded by saying that, despite her lifetime achievement award, Kingsolver “is at the height of her powers, and so we have so much more to look forward to.”
Kingsolver took the stage, beaming. “When I was new to this profession,” she said, “the credited goal of our art was to be perfect and contained and morally disengaged. Art that made people uncomfortable was likely to get scolded by critics. I know this from experience. But it’s all I know how to do.” She continued: “I come from people who aren’t in this room, who’ve never been in a room like this, or in this city, or maybe not in any city, maybe not even very far from where they were born. I write, with their hearts in my throat, the kinds of stories that I grew up hungry for, underpinned with hard questions about class and power. And readers got it.”
She also thanked “booksellers, and librarians, and my wonderful publisher HarperCollins,” who “have always had my back.” Kingsolver concluded: “Artists get called a lot of dreamy things—we’re lighthouses, we’re visionaries…. But I think we’re at our best when we’re disruptors—we get to crack people open.”
Following a video featuring National Book Award winners and presenters past and present—from Ursula K. Le Guin to Stephen King to Toni Morrison to Oprah Winfrey—focusing on the multipronged efforts of the National Book Foundation, executive director Ruth Dickey took the stage. “As I look around this room tonight, I see so many incredible members of Team Book,” Dickey said, shouting out as well to the “thousands” of viewers streaming the ceremony online. “Together, we are the people who believe that books matter.”
Dickey continued: “As we witness and battle mounting book bans and attacks on free expression, we know that hard times are not only coming, but they are here already. And we not only want, but need,” she added, the “perspectives and empathy that books can provide.”
Batiste returned to the stage for a medley once again spanning century and genre, from his own tune “Don’t Stop” to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to “The Saints Go Marchin’ In”—the latter of which brought the room, singing full-throated (or at least trying), to its feet. The tune ushered in the live awards portion of the evening, which was once again dominated by outspoken writers passionate about their politics.
The winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, announced by chair of the judging panel Brein Lopez, was Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers). Safadi took to the stage by first thanking Allah in Arabic, and shared her admiration for her fellow finalists, saying, “I pored over your books with great admiration.” She also extended a “thank you to the Muslim authors who stepped forward” before her. In closing, she turned her attention to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, urging the audience to speak up against injustice.
“Justice and freedom is for all people,” Safadi said. “All of our liberation is tied together.” Her final statement was crystal clear: “Free Palestine!”
The award for Translated Literature was presented by jury chair and NBA winner Jhumpa Lahiri, who praised “independent publishers and small presses for continuing to serve as the main port of entry for translated literature in the United States” and for “center[ing] foreign titles on their lists” at a moment when “discourse of closed borders intensifies.” Lahiri announced Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf), as the winner.
“Some people ask me why I write about things from 100 years ago,” said Yáng, interpreted by King. “I write about Taiwan’s past as a step into its future.” Yáng continued: “Taiwan has never stopped facing the threat of invasion from another, powerful nation…. I write in order to answer the question of, what is a Taiwanese person?” King added that she appreciated the award as “a recognition of the place we come from, Taiwan,” and extended her thanks to Graywolf and “especially our editor Yuka Igarashi for believing in us.”
Poet Richard Blanco, who chaired this year’s panel of judges for the National Book Award for Poetry, called the process of judging this year’s awards “a journey into the vibrancy of what American poetry is all about.” He added that these are the times in which “we most need poetry—to serve as a consolation, to guide us through our storms of hatred and despair, toward horizons or reconciliation and hope.”
Accepting the award for Something About Living (University of Akron Press), Lena Khalaf Tuffaha got visibly emotional. “They were right, it’s heavy,” she said, choking up to applause. She continued: “We are now living in the second November of the American-funded genocide in Palestine. I hope that every one of us can love ourselves enough to stand up and to make it stop. Our service is needed as writers. Our service is needed as human beings. In every room, in every space, especially where there is something to risk, where there is an opportunity to be lost, where that courage will really cost you—that’s what’s most needed.”
Of her father, a refugee from Palestine, Tuffaha said: “He sat me down at age five and told me the story of the homeland that he couldn’t visit anymore. And that story has driven me my entire life.” She added: “I am proud to stand here today and accept this award as a Palestinian American.”
The National Book Award for Nonfiction was introduced by judge Timothy Morton, who remarked that “the whole point of nonfiction is to jump into the unknown with a full heart, and to share [the] unknown.” He added: “Sometimes reality doesn't turn out the way we expect and… we need strong minds and souls to encounter the world as it is.”
Jason De León accepted the award for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking), dedicating it to the book’s subjects and “everyone out there on the migrant trail.” In addition to his “wonderful therapist,” he thanked his team at Viking who “do the work of bookmaking,” giving special shoutouts to his editor Emily Wunderlich and agent Margo Beth Fleming at Brockman, and acknowledging that publishing “is a team effort.” He concluded: “I refuse to live in a world without hope,” adding that he “will not accept the dystopian American future” augured by the Trump administration.
Lauren Groff, chair of the judging panel for fiction, the final award of the night, called the discipline “a way to come at the truth without staring directly at it,” adding: “Turning away from pleasure, from art, from fiction, is tantamount to turning away from why we fight for more dignity.”
In a widely predicted win, Percival Everett took home the award for James, thanking both his current publisher, Doubleday, and Graywolf Press, as well as his editor there for 30 years, the retired Fiona McCrae, who was also in attendance.
“If there were a few horses in here I’d feel a lot better,” he joked, thanking the National Book Foundation for “putting their reputations on the line here.” He continued, joking that ChatGPT, his phone, Siri, and Alexa had helped him compose his speech, and came up with: “ ‘Now’s the time for all good people to come to the aid of the party.’ Though this is no doubt very true,” he said, “It’s a terrible acceptance speech and I apologize,” noting that it was proof that “artificial intelligence is no substitute for the real thing.” He added: “As I look out at this, so much excitement about books, I really do feel hope. But… hope is really no substitute for strategy.”
