L.A.’s Tess Gunty, Imani Perry among winners of 2022 National Book Awards
The National Book Awards — a selection of the year’s outstanding prose works, edited and published in the United States — announced its first recipients on Thursday in a ceremony at Washington, D.C.’s National Symphony Theater, which took place ahead of the March 31 deadline for nominees in the 25 shortlisted categories.
The awards recognize the best in American writing in a variety of categories, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic novels, and young readers’ works.
As with previous years, nearly two-thirds of the shortlisted books in English-language categories were published this year, with more than half of the books in fiction and poetry. The nominees were selected by a committee led by the editor of The New York Times.
“The National Book Awards is a celebration of our writers and in this case, an especially beautiful celebration of literary women in our midst,” said Noma Dumezweni, the chair of the National Book Awards selection committee and the founder of Ms. magazine, which organized Monday’s ceremony.
“Each and every one of these books is a testament to the power of women writers and the timeless power of love.”
The awards celebrate the best that U.S. literature has to offer, recognizing the best of the best written by women — from the very beginning, in the earliest form of human recorded history, to the present day.
“This is the year to recognize that women deserve the recognition and celebration of their powerful contributions,” said Debra Kaufman, the president and CEO of the National Book Foundation, which administers the awards.
The New York Times said all of the shortlisted books that it has selected for inclusion in its March 31 print edition of the newspaper’s Book of the Year issue.
The awards, which have been presented annually since 1970, present the first and only American-wide honors for literary excellence, according to the National Book Foundation.
The winners will be announced May 14, at an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C.
“The selection of winners today is a celebration of the power of these writers, the love they express, the power of literature itself, and a recognition that the women around the world continue to be our greatest and most lasting resource,�
