U.S. author Jesmyn Ward wins Library of Congress fiction prize
The 2022 U.S. Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction has gone to Jesmyn Ward, who at 45 is the youngest person to receive the library's fiction award and is being honoured for her lifetime of work examining racism and social injustice.
The Mississippi-born Ward explores the stories of people living in America's South in her writing. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones, won the National Book Award for fiction in 2011 and her Sing, Unburied, Sing was winner of the 2017 National Book Award.
Her nonfiction work includes the memoir Men We Reaped, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2020 work Navigate Your Stars.
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She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race.
Ward, who is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University, was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.
The virtual prize ceremony will take place at the 2022 National Book Festival on Sept. 3 in Washington, D.C.
The annual Prize for American Fiction honours an American literary writer whose body of work is "distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination."
"I am deeply honoured to receive this award, not only because it aligns my work with legendary company, but because it also recognizes the difficulty and rigour of meeting America on the page, of appraising her as a lover would: clear-eyed, open-hearted, keen to empathize and connect," Ward said in a statement.
"This is our calling, and I am grateful for it."
