NEW YORK — Judges for the National Book Awards honored a comeback Wednesday night, giving the fiction award to Peter Matthiessen’s “Shadow Country,” a revision of a trilogy of novels from the 1990s. The 81-year-old last won a National Book Award 30 years ago.
Other winners were Annette Gordon-Reed in nonfiction, for “The Hemingses of Monticello”; Mark Doty’s “Fire to Fire” in poetry; and former genre writer-for-hire Judy Blundell in young people’s literature, for “What I Saw and How I Lied.”
Publishers paid as much as $25,000 for a table at the awards, held at the restaurant Cipriani on Wall Street.
Awards host Eric Bogosian joked to the audience about the gilded venue: “This was a bank once, and they built banks like this because banks never fail.”
The economy inspired nervous laughter; the name Barack Obama received happy, relieved applause. Bogosian called the bookish president-elect “in the broadest sense of the word, a reader.”
Also nominated for fiction were Marilynne Robinson’s “Home,” Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project,” and debut authors Salvatore Scibona (“The End”) and Rachel Kushner (“Telex from Cuba”).
Runners-up in nonfiction were Jane Mayer for “The Dark Side,” a close look into the war against terrorism; Colorado author Jim Sheeler’s “Final Salute”; Joan Wickersham’s “The Suicide Index”; and Drew Gilpin Faust’s Civil War history, “This Republic of Suffering.”
In poetry, the nominees were Frank Bidart, for “Watching the Spring Festival”; Mark Doty, “Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems”; Reginald Gibbons’ “Creatures of a Day”; Richard Howard’s “Without Saying”; and Patricia Smith, for “Blood Dazzler.”
The other young people’s literature finalists were Laurie Halse Anderson’s “Chains,” Kathi Appelt’s “The Underneath,” E. Lockhart’s “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks” and Tim Tharp for “The Spectacular Now.” Winners each received $10,000.
The awards, founded in 1950, are sponsored by the National Book Foundation.
