National Book Awards go to Susan Choi and Arthur Sze

SCREEN CAPTURE / CREATIVE COMMONS

Susan Choi accepts her National Book Award Wednesday evening for her work of fiction, 'Turst Excercise.'

With more than 1,700 books under consideration, five have been chose to win National Book Awards last Nov. 20 in ceremonies held in New York City. Among the winners is "Trust Exercise" by Susan Choi for fiction and "Sight Lines" by Arthur Sze for poetry.

Winners take home a trophy, a purse of $10,000 and the right to slap that precious gold medallion on the front cover of their work.

“Receiving this award has been joyous for me. To receive such a recognition, from such a remarkable group of my peers in this business, feels amazing,” Choi wrote in a statement to The Cornell Daily Sun.

"Trust Exercise" is an exercise in trust itself as Choi takes the reader through twists. Ostenisbly it's about two high school students in a coming of age story dealing with all the travails of first love and teenage angst, but midway through, the plot thickens and becomes more than that.

The New York Times reviews it thusly: “[Trust Exercise] burns more brightly than anything [Choi’s] yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest. ... Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. ... [A] delicious and, in its way, rather delicate ... phosphorescent examination of sexual consent.”

A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Korean American author teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

"Trust" is the author's fifth novel. Choi’s first novel, "The Foreign Student," won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, "American Woman," was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, "A Person of Interest," was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award.  Her fourth novel, "My Education," received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. 

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Arhur Sze receives his award for his book of poetry.

Sze is also the author of "Compass Rose" (Copper Canyon, 2014), "The Ginkgo Light "(Copper Canyon, 2009), "Quipu" (Copper Canyon, 2005), and "The Redshifting Web" (Copper Canyon, 1998). He is the recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. 

A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Other winners of the 70th annual National Book Awards include:

• Nonfiction: Sarah M. Broom's "The Yellow House"
• Translated literature: Baron Wenckheim's "Homecoming," by László Krasznahorkai and translator Ottilie Mulzet
• Young people's literature: Martin W. Sandler's "1919: The Year That Changed America," won over  "Patron Saints of Nothing" by Filipino American author Randy Ribay.

See the full list of finalists: Jump here.

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