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The show must go on and it did, admirably. The 63rd National Book Awards rolled out without a hitch at Cipriani’s cavernous hall in the former National City Bank building on Wall Street, two weeks after super-storm Sandy wreaked havoc on lower Manhattan as well as on the organisation behind the awards, threatening to derail the annual event.
Post-storm, the office of the National Book Foundation remains closed and the staff are all working from home, having had to evacuate box after box of files down six flights of stairs. The organisation’s servers currently reside in the Bronx dining room of its director, Harold Augenbraum.
It was an opportunity for 669 movers and shakers to gather, and much of the chattering during cocktail hour featured speculation around the words “Penguin” and “Random”. The Penguin crew worried about job losses down the line, feared culture change, and mourned the ending of British ownership; Random staffers wondered about splicing and digesting. Still, it was a night primarily to remember the power of individual books amid the maelstrom buffeting the industry.
Favourite Louise Erdrich won the fiction award for her 14th novel, The Round House (HarperCollins), about the after-effects of a terrible assault on a Native American woman. New Yorker staff writer, Macarthur Foundation “genius” and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo won the non-fiction prize for her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random) about the injustices done to slum dwellers in India.
In recent years there has been criticism that nominated titles sometimes lacked mainstream appeal; this year, the fiction and non-fiction finalists were noticeably higher profile. And Elmore Leonard received the medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. Unlike many of on the night, he gave a terrific, sharply-focused speech.