2011 National Book Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 2011 National Book Awards [1] were announced tonight, November 16, at the National Book Foundation’s 62nd Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.

This year’s National Book Award winners are:

Fiction

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA) — A September 2011 Indie Next Great Read [2]

Nonfiction

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Company)

Poetry

Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press)

Young People’s Literature

Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)

Also at tonight’s ceremony, Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International and a past president of the American Booksellers Association, was honored with the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community.

Poet John Ashbery received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Watch for more on the National Book Awards ceremony in tomorrow’s edition of Bookselling This Week.