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This fall's long list will be announced Sept. 12, followed by the short list on Oct. 15 and the winners on Nov. 20. The National Book Awards have changed several times since being founded in 1950. Winners, who have included William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow, were originally announced in advance of the ceremony. The number of categories and nominees have expanded and contracted, with 17 finalists for nonfiction in 1957 and more than 20 competitive categories in the early 1980s. Awards for translation, "contemporary thought" and first novel have been added, then dropped. For a brief time, even the awards' name was changed, to the American Book Awards. The format had been stable in recent years: competitive awards given for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature, and five finalists announced for each category, picked by five-judge panels of writers that change annually. Over the past two decades, the National Book Foundation has attempted to draw more attention to the actual ceremony, bringing in such celebrities as Steve Martin and Andy Borowitz to host and moving the venue from a Marriott hotel ballroom to the more upscale Cipriani Wall Street. Like the Academy Awards or the Grammys, the National Book Awards ceremony is an industry's showcase for itself, a balance between rewarding excellence and increasing sales that ideally achieves both. Major publishers are directly invested. They're represented on the board of the National Book Foundation and pay thousands of dollars for tables at the ceremony. Ironically, publishers were happy with the fiction nominees of 2012, the last group to be voted on under the old rules. The finalists included a mix of well-known writers (Louise Erdrich, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers) and debut novelists (Ben Fountain and Kevin Powers). For years, foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum has issued oral instructions to judges that they should not pick books based on the publisher or commercial success or the author's reputation. In 2012, the point was reinforced in written guidelines that stated "fame or obscurity, small press or large, should have no bearing" on their decisions. "I have no idea if that made any difference," Augenbraum said. "In fact, one judge thought the rules meant not to overlook the smaller presses."
[Associated
Press;
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