National Book Award Goes to Phil Klay for His Short Story Collection

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/books/national-book-award-goes-to-phil-klay-for-redeployment.html

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Phil Klay won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for his debut short story collection, “Redeployment,” which draws on his experience serving as a Marine in Iraq and captures the terror, boredom and occasionally the humorous side of war.

In an emotional acceptance speech, Mr. Klay described returning from the war and being treated as if he were unstable, and being asked by children if he had killed anyone.

“I came back not knowing what to think,” he said. “What do you do when you’re trying to explain in words, to the father of a fallen Marine, exactly what that Marine meant to you?”

He said writing fiction about his experiences helped him to process it. “I can’t think of a more important conversation to be having,” he said. “War is too strange to be processed alone.”

Some of the stories, which were published by Penguin Press, take place in Anbar Province, while others are set in the United States as soldiers struggle to readjust to civilian life.

In the nonfiction category, Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker, won for “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book explores China’s ongoing transformation into an economic superpower, and the clash between its economic progress and its authoritarian government’s crackdown on social freedoms.

In an acceptance speech, Mr. Osnos thanked his Chinese subjects for taking a risk by talking to him. “They live in a place where it’s very dangerous to be honest and be vulnerable,” he said.

The awards were presented at a black-tie dinner at Cipriani Wall Street, with more than 700 guests attending a ceremony hosted by Daniel Handler, better known as the children’s book author Lemony Snicket.

Mr. Handler proved an edgy and entertaining master of ceremonies. He poked fun at literary navel-gazing and took repeated shots at Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos. In praising the nonprofit publisher Graywolf Press, which had two poetry finalists, Mr. Handler said, “If you are a publishing house interested in not making a profit, please see Jeff Bezos after the show.”

The National Book Award, which was established in 1950, is one of the country’s most prestigious and coveted literary prizes. Books written by American authors and published between Dec. 1, 2013, and Nov. 30, 2014, were eligible this year.

Jacqueline Woodson, a three-time finalist, won the young people’s literature award for her memoir in verse, “Brown Girl Dreaming,” which detailed her experience growing up as an African-American in South Carolina and New York during the 1960s and ’70s. The poet Louise Glück won for her latest collection, “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

For the second year in a row, the National Book Foundation announced a long list of 10 nominees for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature, in an effort to drum up interest and draw more authors into the spotlight. Some literary critics complained that the long lists diluted the impact of the prize. Others noted a stark gender imbalance in this year’s nonfiction long list, which had nine male writers and just one woman, the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast.

This year’s fiction short list was greeted with more enthusiasm. Along with Mr. Klay’s short story collection, the stylistically diverse group of finalists included Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila,” the third novel in a trilogy set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa; Rabih Alameddine’s “An Unnecessary Woman,” about a reclusive older woman in Beirut, Lebanon; Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopian novel “Station Eleven”; and Anthony Doerr’s novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” a work of historical fiction set in Nazi-occupied France during World War II.

The Literarian Award, for outstanding service to the literary community, went to Kyle Zimmer, the president and chief executive of First Book, a nonprofit group that distributes millions of books to children from low-income families.

The fantasy and science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In a career spanning more than 40 years, Ms. Le Guin, 85, has published more than a dozen children’s books, 22 novels and numerous volumes of poetry, translations and short stories. Her young-adult fantasy novel “The Farthest Shore” won the National Book Award in 1973.

In a pointed acceptance speech, Ms. Le Guin criticized the literary community for excluding science fiction and fantasy writers from awards attention for so long, and took publishers and writers to task for bowing to corporate pressures to make books more profitable.

“I have had a long career and a good one, and here at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river,” she said.