Somehow, without even being sure how, self finds herself getting regular e-news from the National Book Foundation. Since no one self knows ever wins the Award, she usually doesn’t pay any attention to these missives (Except, didn’t D.A. Powell just win it in poetry? Self knows D.A. Powell, for sure! She even took him to Higuma, small neighborhood Japanese restaurant in good ol’ RWC!).
Ah, well, yes: back to the latest news on past National Book Award winners. After reading the news, self is more than ever convinced that when you finally succeed in cracking the glass ceiling of one of these prestigious Awards, you will never ever stop getting more Awards: they will all start tumbling into your lap, like a neat pile of dominoes.
Without further ado:
Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose In Other Rooms, Other Wonders received The Story Prize, was also the recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and is a finalist for the Commonwealth Best First Book Prize.
Rae Armantrout, 2009 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection Versed.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, a 2006 finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, was adapted for the big screen as the film “Green Zone,” starring Matt Damon.
Natalie Angier, a finalist in 1999 for Woman: An Intimate Geography, is a nonfiction writer and science journalist for the New York Times. She is currently serving a six-year appointment (2006 – 2012) as an A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, a post previously held by National Book Award authors Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
