Ta-Nehisi Coates wins National Book Award

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose vibrant best-seller,

Between the World and Me

, was lauded in The Inquirer last month as a work of "uncompromising power" - "part memoir, part jeremiad, and part prose poem" - won the National Book Award for nonfiction Wednesday night at a banquet in New York.

Adam Johnson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for The Orphan Master's Son, his novel about North Korea, won the fiction prize for Fortune Smiles, a collection of short stories.

Robin Coste Lewis won the poetry award for her debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus, while Neal Shusterman won the young people's literature award for Challenger Deep.

Coates, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, was recently awarded a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship. His book is addressed to his son, Samori, about the world in which African Americans live.

In the book, he writes: " 'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining)."

Coates wants his son to be "a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world," but he brings scant comfort. "We cannot save ourselves," he writes. "There is no velocity of escape."

In an Inquirer interview last month, Coates spoke of the influence of James Baldwin, and especially The Fire Next Time. "It's a kind of essay, and a kind of writing, you don't see too much anymore," Coates said. "I thought that at this moment we could use something like that."

The award to Johnson in the fiction category may have been the night's biggest surprise.

"I was having a calm evening because this was not going to happen," he said as he accepted the award before about 700 at Cipriani Wall Street.

A New York Times reviewer said of Johnson's work: "As with The Orphan Master's Son, there's a great deal of comedy to be found in Fortune Smiles, though the humor in this new book is offset by a darkness so pervasive I found it seeping into my daily life. Despairing men are at the heart of each of these tales, most of them protagonists on the cusp of being antagonists."

Coste Lewis, a Provost's Fellow at the University of Southern California, won the poetry prize for her debut work, a meditation on the black female figure throughout time. It was praised by poet Claudia Rankine as "altogether new, open, experimental and ground-breaking."

The young people's winner, Challenger Deep, a novel about mental illness, tells the story of a brilliant high school student's journey by ship to the deepest point on Earth and his increasingly odd behavior.

Also, author Don DeLillo was honored for his body of literary work with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

The full list of National Book Awards finalists:

Fiction

Karen E. Bender, Refund

Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Nonfiction

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Sally Mann, Hold Still

Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus

Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light

Poetry

Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn

Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things

Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine

Young People's Literature

Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish

Laura Ruby, Bone Gap

Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War

Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

Noelle Stevenson, Nimona