The National Book Awards

The National Book Awards

This article relates to People Like Us

Jason Mott won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction with Hell of a Book, a novel that shares some characters and qualities with People Like Us. In People Like Us, one character narrates his own experience winning what is alternately called the National Book Award, "the n-word," and "The Big One." Mott is playful and exaggerated (let's hope) in his implications of just how revered and coveted the NBA is. In one scene, the author-narrator's agent Sharon says, referring to the bronze sculpture given as the prize, out of which partying publishing people have been doing shots of "Cross-Genre" ("moonshine, champagne, and a dash of strawberry syrup"), "where is he? … He's part mine, you know," before she "darts off into the party and snatches [the] big award out of some proofreader's bra, kisses it on the orifice, and disappears in the direction of the elevator to do god knows what to it." But the National Book Award is revered and coveted, as much as an American book award can be.

The National Book Awards have been around since 1950, with current prize categories in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People's Literature. For each category, a longlist of ten titles is selected, and judges narrow this to five finalists before announcing a winner. At the awards ceremony, which takes place in the fall, each winner is given $10,000 and one of the aforementioned bronze sculptures.

Behind the National Book Awards is the National Book Foundation, whose mission is "to celebrate the best literature published in the United States, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in our culture." On the NBA website, the foundation espouses its core values and intentions, including "building a more inclusive and equitable world" and "[welcoming] a wide range of voices into our organization and in the broader literary arts ecosystem to inform our organizational practices and decisions." Aside from the awards, the National Book Foundation invests in educational and public programs, book distributions, and support for other literary organizations, along with additional prizes and grants.

Some early winners of the National Book Award were Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger, Marianne Moore, Vladimir Nabokov, and Adrienne Rich. In recent years, winners (in addition to Mott) have included Percival Everett for James (2024), Susan Choi for Trust Exercise (2019), Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and Ta-Nehisi Coates for Between the World and Me (2015). In People Like Us, Mott humorously suggests that awards like "The Big One" can raise a Black author's profile to the point of being noticed in public, but not to the point where the non-Black public can necessarily distinguish them from other acclaimed Black authors. His author-narrator makes a game of sometimes pretending to be Colson Whitehead (who also won the National Book Award, for The Underground Railroad in 2016) or Ta-Nehisi Coates, signing books with one name or the other for those who think they have recognized him.

As Mott shows with his humorous fictional account of the physical award being defiled by those excitedly celebrating its presence, the National Book Award is highly appreciated for its place in the American literary scene by writers and those who work in publishing, and his depiction of wild debauchery surrounding it in an industry hardly known for such things is both pointedly funny in its lack of realism and revealing of the truth that reading culture is not generally widely celebrated in the United States. Which isn't to say that there aren't other respectable and significant American book awards, but a milestone like the NBA—a buoy of rare heft and stature—brings with it a certain sparkle and shine that may be enough to make some book people lose themselves entirely in the moment.

Filed under Books and Authors

This article relates to People Like Us. It first ran in the August 27, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.