Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “Salvage the Bones,” a haunting tale of the struggles of a 15-year-old pregnant girl as a hurricane bears down on her fictional Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Miss.
In the nonfiction category, Stephen Greenblatt won for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” a “rumination on the pleasure of knowledge and on the agony of its loss,” the judges’ citation said. It was published by W.W. Norton & Company.
“My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space and time and distance, to have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you,” Mr. Greenblatt said in his acceptance speech. “My book is about what the magic of the written word is.”
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