Travel Book Among National Book Awards Finalists
Travel Blog • Ben Keene • 10.11.06 | 1:45 PM ET
It’s true. The National Book Foundation announced its finalists for the 2006 National Book Awards this afternoon, listing as usual, five nominees for each of its four main categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. Rarely are travel-related titles recognized by the foundation. Yet there it is, among the finalists for the nonfiction award: Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present
Among other things, he wrote:
You know, I’m never certain how I feel about travel writing. I never conceived River Town as a travel book; it’s more about living and working in a place for two years. And although some of my New Yorker stories have been reprinted in travel writing anthologies, pretty much all of them are about a place where I’ve spent a decade. I have a Chinese driver’s license and I pay taxes to the People’s Republic. I live there. Usually I’m not traveling far for my research, and the stories aren’t about my personal experience; they are generally focused on Chinese people. But it seems that anything written about a foreign country automatically falls under the category of travel. Why isn’t Desert Solitaire on lists of great travel books? People generally don’t think of McPhee’s Coming into the Country as a travel book, but they would if Alaska happened to be in Russia.
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz