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After months of longlists, shortlists, and a strange tie-in with msnbc's Morning Joe, the National Book Award winners were finally announced tonight. Here they are!
- Young People's Literature: The Thing About Luck, by Cynthia Kadohata
- Poetry: Incarnadine, by Mary Szybist
- Nonfiction: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by George Packer
- Fiction: The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride
Here's McBride accepting his award:
James McBride wins the 2013 National Book Award for Fiction for THE GOOD LORD BIRD! @nationalbook #nbawards pic.twitter.com/eZBNalQLks
— Troy Johnson (@aalbc) November 21, 2013
McBride was "noticeably shocked," according to Millions, saying: "I didn't think I would win today ... If any of the other writers had won, I wouldn’t feel bad because they are all fine writers, but it sure is nice to win."
He probably wasn't the only one who was surprised. Thomas Pynchon and Jhumpa Lahiri were favored to win the fiction prize, while New Yorker scribes Lawrence Wright and Jill Lepore were favorites in the nonfiction category. The Daily Beast asked a "color expert" to try to predict the winners based on the book covers. She got one out of four. That's still better than The Huffington Post, which didn't get any.