Sarah Lewis and Claire Messud, two authors who live and teach in the area, and Danzy Senna, who grew up in Boston, are among this year’s winners of American Book Awards. Announced this week, the awards will be formally presented on Sunday, Oct. 26, at an event on the UC Berkeley campus.
Messud, who lives in Cambridge and teaches at Harvard, has received the American Book Award for her novel “This Strange Eventful History,” a generation-spanning epic based in part on the author’s own ancestors and their experiences in France and Algeria during the long period of French colonial rule and beyond. The Globe’s reviewer wrote that the book offered a “piercingly intimate look at the forces that shape a family.” Messud’s previous novels include “The Burning Girl” and “The Woman Upstairs.”
Another Harvard faculty member to be recognized with an American Book Award is Sarah Lewis, honored for her nonfiction book “The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America.” In the book, Lewis, who founded Vision & Justice, an initiative dedicated to research and collaboration on the way visual culture affects our democracy, uses images to explore American ideas of race, identity, and representation. Lewis’s previous book, “The Rise,” examined creativity and the role of failure along the path to success.
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Danza Senna was honored for her novel “Colored Television,” a satire about the literary and entertainment industries and how they interact with race. In a review of her previous novel, “New People‚” our critic praised Senna’s sharp eye and keen wit as she “explores the fraught social and emotional world of the biracial elite.” Senna’s mother was the white poet Fanny Howe, and her father was Carl Senna, a Black scholar and editor. Senna’s memoir “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” plumbs the difficulties her parents faced in a marriage that crossed lines of race and class. Senna’s husband, Percival Everett, joins her on the list of American Book Award winners this year for his novel “James‚” which also won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Kirkus Prize. The couple now lives in Los Angeles.
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The American Book Awards are awarded by the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in 1976 “dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of contemporary American multicultural literature.” A complete list of current and past winners can be found at beforecolumbusfoundation.com.
Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.
