Maya Angelou to receive honorary book award

The poet and author of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" will be this year's recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary National Book Award for contributions to the literary community, the National Book Foundation announced Thursday.

Maya Angelou
her latest autobiography
The real highlight of the National Book Awards ceremony Wednesday night in New York was hearing Maya Angelou break into song. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison had just presented the 85-year-old author the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. “It’s amazing,” Angelou said over and over. “It’s just amazing.” Speaking without notes and wearing dark glasses, she referred to the rainbow that God put in the sky in the Book of Genesis.

James McBride, a former Washington Post Style writer, won the fiction prize this year for his brilliant, boisterous book “The Good Lord Bird.”  It’s an unlikely comic novel about a young boy and the abolitionist John Brown. 

The chair of the fiction committee, former New York Times Book Review editor Charles McGrath, said that the judges had received more than 400 submissions. “Not all these books were good,” he quipped. As expected, Thomas Pynchon, a finalist for his novel “Bleeding Edge,” did not attend the ceremony.