Last week, the National Book Award winners were announced:

Fiction
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)

Nonfiction
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton)

Poetry
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)

Young People’s Literature
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)

Publishing legend Barney Rossett and author Maxine Hong Kingston were also honored. Interestingly, Matthiessen’s novel Shadow Country is actually a one-volume revision of three earlier novels: Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone. Which is perhaps good news for writers: it’s never too late to go back and revise your work, even when it’s been successfully published three times! Huh. I mean, it’s an imaginative leap of faith to think about being as well-known and prolific as Matthiessen, and yet motivated to re-craft so much of my prose. But it clearly pays off.

The New York Times considered the question of eligibility when Shadow Country became a finalist:
“It wasn’t really a controversy,” said Harold Augenbraum, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, which administers the awards. “It was as much a head-scratcher as anything else.… We allow collections of previously published material,” he said. “Collected poems, collected essays, short-story collections — books like that. We don’t allow reprints, but we didn’t consider this a reprint. There’s a lot of new writing here.”

And according to Matthiessen himself:
“There’s hardly a sentence in the whole damn thing that’s exactly the same.”

Wow. I’m not sure whether I should be amazed or depressed by how much revision and tranformation truly good writing must undergo. But it’s definitely impressive.

If you want to hear more about judging National Book Awards, get in touch with Emerson Professor Megan Marshall, who was a Nonfiction Judge this year! Although you may want to wait a few weeks… she’s probably pretty tired from reading the hundreds of books she was considering.

Tags:   Annette Gordon-Reed · awards · Judy Blundell · kim · Mark Doty · Megan Marshall · Peter Matthiessen · writing processNo Comments