Atlantic journalist dedicates his nonfiction prize to his friend Prince Jones, killed by a police officer in 2000, while Adam Johnson takes top fiction award

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Ta-Nehisi Coates has won the National Book Awards’ top prize for nonfiction for his bestselling depiction of America’s race problem, Between the World and Me.

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Coates received the prestigious award at a time when America’s systemic racism faces renewed scrutiny and the Black Lives Matter movement pressures the US government and its citizens to examine – and act against – widespread inequality.

“At the heart of our country is the notion that we are OK with the presumption that black people somehow have an angle, somehow have a predisposition to criminality,” said Coates, accepting his award.



Coates’ prize is the latest in a string of accolades awarded to the Atlantic journalist, who was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant” in September.



He dedicated his award to his friend Prince Jones, who was killed by a police officer in 2000. Coates said Jones’s death was at the core of his book, which also delves into later incidents of police violence against people of color.

As a black man he cannot punish the officer who killed his friend, he added. “What I do have power to do is to say you won’t enroll me in this life ... you won’t make me a part of it.”

Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles took home the 2015 National Book Award for fiction at the ceremony, held at Cipriani in Manhattan on Wednesday night.

Despite winning the Pulitzer prize for his novel The Orphan Master’s Son in 2012, Johnson was a surprise winner here, beating out the favorites: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. Only American citizens are eligible for the awards, now in their 66th year.

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Publishers submitted 1,428 books for review: 419 fiction, 494 nonfiction, 221 poetry and 294 in young people’s literature. Each finalist receives $1,000 and the winner takes home $10,000.

Robin Coste Lewis won in the poetry category for her debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus, a meditation on being a black woman in America, while the young people’s literature prize went to Neal Shusterman for Challenger Deep,about a teenager with schizophrenia. The work is inspired by Shusterman’s son, Brendan, who was diagnosed with the illness at 16.

Honors were also presented to Don DeLillo, recognised for his distinguished contribution to American letters, and James Patterson, who was awarded for his outstanding service to the American literary community.

The New York City schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, presented the award to Patterson, who donated more than $1m in grants to independent bookstores last year. The author has also donated more than 250,000 books to children and more than 650,000 books to US soldiers.

James Patterson announces first round of school libraries to receive grants Read more

Fariña said Patterson was a “hero” and asked that more people in the room emulate his contributions to the literary world. He added that he was concerned that American publishing and literature was “in trouble”.

“Let’s find a way to make sure that there is another generation of readers out there,” he said. “And bookstores, and libraries, and healthy, flourishing publishers.”

He was followed by DeLillo, who held the room with a haunting ode to the oldest books in his collection, including Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead.

“Here, I am not the writer at all, I am the grateful reader,” DeLillo said, accepting his award from the Pulitzer prize-winning author Jennifer Egan. Past recipients of the award include Toni Morrison, Joan Didion and Judy Blume.

The National Book Foundation announced in September that he would receive the 2015 honor. “Lists are a form of cultural hysteria so let’s just say that the strong work keeps coming and that the novel as a form continues to provoke innovation on the part of younger writers,” DeLillo said then.

“It’s true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.”