Eyes on the Prize

What do Joan Didion, John Updike, and Alice Walker have in common?

On the surface, not much besides the fact that all three are iconoclastic contemporary American writers. However, a glance at their biographies reveals that they all share the honor of having received a National Book Award (NBA), the most prestigious literary prize presented in the United States. Coincidentally, NMSG has done composition work on books by all three of these highly regarded authors.

This year, NMSG has a more immediate connection to the National Book Awards.

The five finalists in each of the four categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature) for this year’s National Book Awards were announced earlier this month. Three books composed by NMSG are among the five competing for an NBA in the Nonfiction category:

• Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945–1956, by Anne Applebaum, published by Doubleday
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo, published by Random House
• The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4, by Robert Caro, published by Knopf

Robert Caro won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2002 for another book composed by NMSG, Master of the Senate (Knopf), volume 2 in his acclaimed multivolume biography of LBJ.

The winners in each category are selected by a separate panel of judges, who themselves are writers recognized as doing outstanding work in that literary genre. This year’s Nonfiction judges are Brad Gooch, Linda Gordon, Woody Holton, Susan Orlean, and Judith Shulevitz.

The winners will be announced November 14. Each winner will receive $10,000 and a bronze sculpture.

And, for the record, the book that won Joan Didion her National Book Award was The Year of Magical Thinking, composed by NMSG and published by Knopf in 2005.