The National Book Awards on Wednesday gave its fiction prize to author Jason Mott, whose novel Hell of a Book chronicled a black author’s book tour interspersed with a young Black boy in the rural South, to highlight the 2021 winners list.The honors, held remotely for the second consecutive year, are one of the most prestigious awards in publishing.
Past winners include William Faulkner, W.H. Auden, and Ralph Ellison, and winning in this age of adaptation instantly elevates the author.“I would like to dedicate this award to all the other mad kids, to all the outsiders, the weirdos, the bullied,” Mott said in his acceptance speech. “The ones so strange they had no choice but to be misunderstood by the world and by those around them.
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