Six weeks ago Tayari Jones was on a stage in Washington, telling an audience how her last novel simply refused to come together. “The novel wasn’t noveling,” she said, sitting beside Ann Patchett, who was there to collect the Library of Congress Prize. On Wednesday night the book she wrote instead, Kin, won the Kirkus Prize for fiction, and a check for $50,000 to go with it.
The winners were named at a ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop in New York, which Kirkus also streamed on YouTube. The nonfiction prize went to Pamela Colloff for Catch the Devil, and the prize for young readers’ literature to Elizabeth Acevedo for Anger Is Only a Shadow. Each winner also takes home a trophy made by the London designers Vezzini & Chen. The prize has been given since 2014, and only books that earned a starred Kirkus review are eligible.
Two girls from Honeysuckle
Kin follows Vernice and Annie, “cradle friends” in the small town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, in the Jim Crow years. Both girls are motherless. Vernice’s father killed her mother when she was a baby, and Annie’s mother simply left. Vernice goes off to Spelman College and marries money, while Annie runs away to look for the mother who abandoned her. The jurors praised a novel that “brims with the cadences of the Black South.” Jones beat a strong field to win, including Colson Whitehead, Douglas Stuart, Julie Orringer, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Brenda Navarro.
“The novel wasn’t noveling”
The snitch and the death row case
Colloff, of ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, has spent years on the case at the heart of Catch the Devil. In 1985, 14-year-old Shelly Boggio was murdered in Pinellas County, Florida. Jim Dailey, a Vietnam veteran, was convicted in 1987 and sentenced to death, even though no physical evidence tied him to the crime. The decisive testimony came from Paul Skalnik, a con man and serial jailhouse informant who claimed Dailey had confessed to him. Dailey has always said he is innocent, and he is still on death row. The jurors praised Colloff for exposing a justice system “all too happy to look the other way.” She saw off a formidable shortlist, which included Patrick Radden Keefe, Michael Pollan and Gisèle Pelicot.
Third time lucky
Acevedo had been a Kirkus finalist twice before, for The Poet X and Clap When You Land. This time she won. Anger Is Only a Shadow, written in a mix of verse and prose, is about Lil, a 17-year-old in Washington who is sent home from juvenile detention wearing an ankle monitor. Her beloved older brother, away at college in Richmond, is starting to behave strangely, and Lil has to decide whether to break the terms of her release to go to him. Acevedo has said the book draws on her years teaching at a youth detention center and on her own brother’s schizophrenia.
A word from the desk
It is a nice twist that the book Jones nearly did not write is the one now collecting prizes. If you only have room for one, take Kin. But Catch the Devil is the one we suspect people will still be arguing about next year.
News Editorial Desk, Pine Tree Shilling Publishing