National Book Award: Winners, Finalists, and Longlisted Titles
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The mission of the National Book Foundation is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America. National Book Awards are given in five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.
Here we highlight the winners of African descent. The first African-American writer to win a National Book Award was Ralph Ellison, in 1953, for Invisible Man.
2 Books Honored by the National Book Foundation in 1982
Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alphabet Book
by Muriel Feelings, Illustrated by Tom Feelings
"The beautiful vision of African life in the text merely hints of the community breathtakingly captured in the illustrations . The space has been filled with monumental figures that glorify the power and beauty of man." Horn Book. Full color. Caldecott Honor Medal; ALA Notable Book.
Russian Journal
by Andrea Lee
At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author s penetrating, vivid account of her everyday life as an expatriate in Soviet culture, chronicling her fascinating exchanges with journalists, diplomats, and her Soviet contemporaries. The winner of the Jean Stein Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and the book that launched Lee s career as a writer Russian Journal is a beautiful and clear-eyed travel-writing classic.
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