The winners of this year's National Book Awards, which is given to the best literature in America, was announced at a gala ceremony on November 16, 2022. Post-pandemic, this was the first time that the award ceremony was held in person.
Author Tess Gunty won the National Book Award 2022 for fiction for her novel 'The Rabbit Hutch'. Interestingly, this is her debut novel and it is set in Indiana's low-income housing community. In her acceptance speech, Gunty cited recent comments made by poetry nominee Sharon Olds about literature’s essential role in society. Gunty called books a path to calling attention to those “neglected” and otherwise not visible. “Attention is the most sacred resource we have,” she said, calling books among the last places “where we spend the resource freely and need the most... I think kindness wins. That’s the point of this evening.”
