Sigrid Nunez Wins National Book Award for 'The Friend'

A sometimes acerbic meditation on loss and love, the novel was among this year’s critical favorites. Times critic Dwight Garner called it “dry, allusive and charming,” noting that when the fragile writer adopts the large, lumbering dog, “the comedy here writes itself.”

“The Friend” perhaps also resonated with critics and judges this year because of its exploration of sexual harassment: The main character’s friend was a prominent writer who leveraged his fame to have inappropriate relationships with his younger students.

Nunez — the author of the novels “Salvation City,” “The Last of Her Kind,” “A Feather on the Breath of God” and “For Rouenna,” among other books — spoke in her acceptance speech about how writers are able to find meaning in pain and emotional hardship because suffering and loss can generate great literature.

“However dreadful, it may be of use,” she said.

Jeffrey C. Stewart won the nonfiction prize for his book “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.” Locke, a philosopher, was a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

The awards, given out by the National Book Foundation, date to 1950. Some of America’s most influential writers have received them, including W.H. Auden, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Adrienne Rich, J.D. Salinger, Eudora Welty and William Carlos Williams.

The ceremony, held at a black-tie dinner with hundreds of guests at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan, is typically the most glamorous literary event of the year. Actor Nick Offerman hosted, and adopted an earnest note: “In our inexorable pursuit of freedom and human rights, books serve as weapons and also as shields,” he said. “They are perhaps the greatest creation of humankind.”

A new category, for translated literature, was introduced this year; “The Emissary,” by Yoko Tawada and translated by Margaret Mitsutani, won the inaugural award.

Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel “The Poet X” won the award for young people’s literature. Written in verse, the story follows a 15-year-old girl from a Dominican family in Harlem navigating the perils of adolescence and finding solace in her poetry notebook.

Justin Phillip Reed’s “Indecency” won the poetry prize. In their citation, the judges praised the collection as a “formally explosive” work that makes “intimacy both refuge and weapon.”

Prolific Chilean writer Isabel Allende accepted the foundation’s lifetime achievement award, becoming the first Spanish-language author to receive the prize. “The values and principles that sustain our civilization are under siege,” she said in her acceptance speech. “If we listen to another person’s story, if we tell our own story, we start to heal from division and hatred.”

This year’s fiction finalists included a mix of experimental fiction from independent publishers like Soho Press and Graywolf (10 of the 25 finalists were books published by small presses) and works by established novelists. The finalists also included Lauren Groff, who was on the shortlist for “Florida” and had been widely expected to win in 2015; and Rebecca Makkai, the author of three previous books, who was nominated for “The Great Believers,” about a group of queer friends living in Chicago in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic.

Some of the biggest surprises in the fiction category involved not the five writers who made the shortlist, but the critical and commercial darlings who were overlooked. Two of this year’s most popular and acclaimed novels, “There There” by Tommy Orange and “An American Marriage” by Tayari Jones, were longlisted but failed to make the finalist cut.

Apart from Wednesday’s ceremony, it has generally been a lackluster literary awards season. The Nobel Prize for Literature was canceled this year because of a sexual misconduct scandal that engulfed a prominent man with close ties to the Swedish Academy. The Man Booker Prize, which went to Northern Irish author Anna Burns for “Milkman,” did not generate the kind of buzz and controversy it has in previous years. And there have been few breakout debut novels or runaway best-sellers that the literary world has rallied around. Fiction sales overall have slipped while readers have been glued to the nonstop news cycle.

The New York Times

Sigrid Nunez Wins National Book Award for 'The Friend'

NEW YORK — Sigrid Nunez won the National Book Award for fiction Wednesday night for her novel “The Friend,” which centers on a lonely writer who takes comfort after her friend kills himself in caring for his Great Dane.

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!