Jesmyn Ward, Masha Gessen among National Book Award winners

Jesmyn Ward’s novel is her second book to win a National Book Award. Jesmyn Ward’s novel is her second book to win a National Book Award. Photo: Scribner / Getty Images Photo: Scribner / Getty Images Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Jesmyn Ward, Masha Gessen among National Book Award winners 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Jesmyn Ward has won the National Book Award for fiction for her novel “Sing, Unburied, Sing.”

Told from multiple perspectives in a fierce, unadorned style, the book centers on a family’s road trip in hardscrabble Mississippi.

In her review of the novel for The Chronicle, Alexis Burling wrote, “It’s Ward’s clear sense of time, place, and the rich mysteries stuffed in-between that brings this soulful, truth-telling novel together. … Ward’s descriptions of the ‘feathery dark heart’ of the region’s bayous, the oppressive heat and its dense woods marred by a violent and tragic history ring out like poetry dangling from the ghost-ridden branches of its trees.”

It was the second National Book Award for Ward, a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, who also won the prize in 2011 for her novel “Salvage the Bones.”

Masha Gessen won the award for nonfiction at the Wednesday night ceremony for “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.”

In his Chronicle review, Kevin Canfield called the book “harrowing, compassionate and important ... a remarkable portrait of an ever-shifting era, as told through the experiences of four people who were born in the waning years of the USSR.”

The award for poetry went to Frank Bidart for “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016.”

A native of Bakersfield who now lives in Cambridge, Mass., Bidart has won numerous other prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Fellow poet Louise Glück once wrote, “More obsessively, more profoundly than any poet since [John] Berryman (whom he in no way resembles), Bidart explores individual guilt, the insoluble dilemma. ... Frank Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country.”

Robin Benway was given the prize for Young People’s Literature for her novel “Far From the Tree.”

The winners of the 68th annual awards were chosen from among 20 finalists named in October. The winners receive $10,000 each.

Held in New York City, the awards ceremony was hosted by actress and activist Cynthia Nixon.

“It’s a privilege to be in this room full of huge nerds,” Nixon said in her opening remarks. “I feel right at home.”

Books, Nixon added, “are among the most powerful weapons we have against what has lately felt like an often hostile world. ... Books matter, and tonight helps remind us of that.”

During the ceremony, President Bill Clinton presented Richard Robinson, president of Scholastic Inc., with this year’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. In his remarks, Clinton said the making of a book is “the greatest model of creative cooperation I can think of.”

Author Annie Proulx was given a lifetime achievement award by the actress Anne Hathaway, who starred in “Brokeback Mountain,” adapted from Proulx’s short story.

“This is a Kafkaesque time,” Proulx said in accepting the award. “The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. ... We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war.

“To me,” Proulx added, “the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerated destruction of the natural world.” She then sang the praises of citizen science projects, saying, “This is something everyone can do.”

Although she was being given a lifetime achievement award, Proulx noted, “I didn’t start writing until I was 58. So if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off...”

Past winners of the National Book Award include William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon and Alice Walker.

More information: www.nationalbook.org

John McMurtrie is The San Francisco Chronicle’s book editor. Email: jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @McMurtrieSF