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Jesmyn Ward wins National Book Award for ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’

Ward was named the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, about a Mississippi family’s epic road trip.
 
Published Nov. 16, 2017
Jesmyn Ward is pictured near where she grew up in DeLisle, Miss., May 15, 2013. Ward won the 2017 National Book Award for fiction for ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing,’ a dark, fablelike family epic set in contemporary Mississippi that grapples with race, poverty and the psychic scars of past violence. (James Patterson/The New York Times)
Jesmyn Ward is pictured near where she grew up in DeLisle, Miss., May 15, 2013. Ward won the 2017 National Book Award for fiction for ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing,’ a dark, fablelike family epic set in contemporary Mississippi that grapples with race, poverty and the psychic scars of past violence. (James Patterson/The New York Times)

Jesmyn Ward is having a good year.

At a glamorous ceremony Wednesday night in New York, Ward was named the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, about a Mississippi family's epic road trip. The book is Ward's third novel — and her second National Book Award winner. She w

At the National Book Foundation ceremony, streamed live on Facebook, Ward told the audience, "You looked at me, at the people I love and write about, you looked at my poor, my black, my Southern children, women and men — and you saw yourself."

The nonfiction prize went to journalist Masha Gessen's timely The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which follows the lives of four people born at a time that Russia seemed poised for democracy, only to be crushed by the emergence of the current oligarchy.

Poet Frank Bidart received the poetry prize for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, a sweeping collection of his deeply empathetic poems.

The award for young people's literature went to Robin Benway's Far from the Tree, the story of an adopted teen learning about her biological family.

Each winner receives a $10,000 prize.

Richard Robinson, CEO of Scholastic Publishing, received the literarian award for outstanding service to the American literary community.

Novelist Annie Proulx, who won the fiction award in 1993 for The Shipping News, accepted the foundation's lifetime achievement award — noting that she didn't begin writing until she was 58. "So if you've been thinking about it and putting it off, go ahead."

"We don't live in the best of all possible worlds," Proulx said. "We live in a Kafkaesque time." Books, she said, are "the indispensable silver lining."