National Book Awards

Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, has been named the 2009 winner of The National Book Award for Fiction. The novel focuses on the lives of various New Yorkers on the day in 1974 when French trapeze artist Phillip Petit walked a tight rope between the World Trade Center towers. McCann, who has called his book an act of hope written in part as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, praised the generosity of American fiction and of the American people, and dedicated his prize to a fellow Irish-American writer, Frank McCourt. T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, was the Nonfiction winner and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for Poetry. The Young People's Award went to Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, by Phillip Hoose, a true story of an early civil rights heroine, who joined Hoose on the stage. A special prize, voted on by the public, was given to The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor as the best of all fiction winners in the National Book Award's 60-year history. The 2009 Literarian Award for outstanding service to the American literary community went to Dave Eggers, author and co-founder of McSweeney’s, a literary journal. Eggers, who teaches writing to high school students, quoted some of his students’ enthusiastic comments on the subject of reading, including their total disdain for electronic readers!