National Book Awards

Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” a bleak but determined novel about a black community in Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina, won the fiction prize. Ward’s acceptance, the culmination of a night of emotional speeches and tributes to those who had been silenced, noted that the death of her younger brother had inspired her to become a writer. She realized that life was a “feeble, unpredictable thing,” but that books were a testament of strength before a punishing world.

“I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South,” said Ward, whose brother was hit by a drunk driver the year she graduated from college. Earlier in the week, she told The Associated Press that writing was a way to “ease the looming fact of death.”

Ward’s novel, picked over such better known works as Tea Obreht’s “The Tiger’s Wife,” was based partly on first-hand experience. She was with her family in Mississippi when Katrina hit. They fled the house, fearful of drowning in their own attic.

“We went out into the storm, sheltered in our cars for hours, were denied shelter by a white family who told us we could sit outside in their field but couldn’t shelter in their house, and then made our way to an intersection where another family, again white, took us in,” she said. “To say the least, it was traumatic.”

Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction Wednesday. The poetry prize went to Nikki Finney’s “Head Off & Split,” summation of African-American history from slavery to Katrina, while Thanhhai Lai’s “Inside Out & Back Again,” the story of a Vietnamese family in Alabama, won for young people’s literature at a time when the state is reconsidering sweeping anti-immigration laws that went into effect in September.

Winners each receive $10,000.

Actor-author John Lithgow hosted the ceremony, declaring himself humbled before the “great thoughts,” ”quicksilver wit” and “eloquent locution” among the attendees. After Finney’s remarks, a compressed and impassioned review of the injustices and triumphs set to verse in her book that had audience members standing and cheering, he expressed pity for the winners who had to follow. Greenblatt, tearful in victory, noted the miracle of words, how an ancient poet such as Lucretius could matter so greatly centuries later.

“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 in the room with you, speaking in your ear,” said Greenblatt, a Harvard professor also known for his Shakespeare biography “Will in the World.”

Honorary prizes were given to Florida-based bookseller Mitch Kaplan, who looked back warmly on a 30-year career/calling in a business he found more fulfilling than law school, and to Ashbery, a highly praised poet with an acknowledged reputation for an inaccessible style, who called writing a “pleasure I can almost taste.” In a self-deprecating speech, the 84-year-old Ashbery confided that even intelligent people find what he writes “makes no sense” and “near root canal” as an experience to read.

“I never meant for it to be (difficult),” he said. “I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves over to something that may change us.”

The National Books Awards are chosen by separate panels of writers for each category. Judges looked through 1,223 books in all. This year’s prizes were born in controversy, after the nominees were first announced weeks ago. The list for young people’s literature initially included “Shine,” by the popular author Lauren Myracle. But the National Book Foundation, which sponsors the awards, quickly acknowledged that “Shine” had been inadvertently chosen over Franny Billingsley’s “Chime.” Nominees are read over the phone by the judging committee to the foundation and one title was mistaken for the other. In an embarrassing see-saw of decisions, Myracle was removed, reinstated, then pushed into withdrawing.

Young people’s judge Mark Aronson joked about the error Wednesday, noting how a misheard phone call in Game 5 of the World Series from the St. Louis Cardinals’ dugout to the team’s bullpen led to the wrong pitcher on the mound at a crucial moment and to the Cardinals’ defeat by the Texas Rangers.

But St. Louis went on to win the series, Aronson added, and so, too, the awards were destined to end in triumph.

Smith became the rare rock star to win a competitive literary award (Bob Dylan has win an honorary Pulitzer) and the one-time punk rocker offered an old-fashioned tribute to books. She begged publishers not to let the printed page die in the electronic age and recalled working decades ago at a Scribner’s bookstore, stacking the National Book Award winners and wondering how it would feel to win one.

“So thank you for letting me find out,” said Smith, 63, who now claims an award previously given to Rachel Carson, Gore Vidal and Joan Didion.

The fiction prize Wednesday night was a surprise, Jaimy Gordon’s “Lord of Misrule,” a wry, hard-luck racetrack comedy chosen over such better known works as Lionel Shriver’s “So Much for That” and Nicole Krauss’ “Great House.”

Gordon herself is a story of luck turning. For years, she has written books released by small publishers, most recently, McPherson & Company, based north of Manhattan in Kingston, N.Y. She spoke briefly, acknowledged she had not expected to win and mentioned friends who told her that she had given them hope just by being nominated.

Gordon’s fate has already changed. The paperback of “Lord of Misrule” has been acquired by Vintage Books, an imprint of Random House, Inc. Her next novel will be published by another Random House imprint, Pantheon. Meanwhile, the head of McPherson, Bruce McPherson, handed out business cards after the ceremony and remembered meeting Gordon when both were studying at Brown University in the early 1970s.

“She certainly stood out,” McPherson said.

Kathryn Erskine’s “Mockingbird,” inspired in part by “To Kill a Mockingbird” and by the Virginia Tech shootings, was cited for young people’s literature. Awarded for a story featuring an 11-year-old girl with Asperger’s, Erskine praised parents who encourage their children to ask questions and teachers who inspire students to read and to “think for themselves.”

Terrance Hayes, whose “Lighthead” won for poetry, thanked his wife and editor Paul Slovak at Penguin for being “the best kind of partner,” one “who lets you be imperfect.”

Winners in the competitive categories for the 61st annual awards each received $10,000. The black-tie ceremony was hosted by humorist Andy Borowitz and held under the towering columns of Cipriani Wall Street.

Honorary medals were presented to “Bonfire of the Vanities” novelist Tom Wolfe and to one of the creators of “Sesame Street,” Joan Ganz Cooney. Smith did not sing Wednesday, but there was music on stage, as the white-suited Wolfe crooned a few lines from “The Girl of Ipanema,” part of a long, leisurely talk that made up for the brevity of the other winners. He shared memories of his early newspapers days and of the party thrown by Leonard Bernstein and attended by members of the Black Panthers, a gathering immortalized by Wolfe as “radical chic.”

The celebrated “New Journalist” well exceeded his declared deadline of six minutes to tell his story. Midway through his speech, the last before dinner was served, waiters began approaching tables and some of his words were hard to hear over the clatter of plates being set down.