National Book Award 2009

Colum McCann has won the National Book Award Fiction Prize for Let the Great World Spin. Last night’s event made the Irish author one of only three foreign-born writers to win the award in its sixty-year history. Let the Great World Spin focuses on promise, mystery and mortality in 1970s New York, on the day that French trapeze artist Philippe Petit walked a high-wire suspended between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.

Accepting the award at the black-tie awards ceremony at Manhattan’s Cipriani Wall Street restaurant, McCann spoke of the obligations of his craft. ‘As fiction writers and people who believe in the word,’ he said, ‘we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right.’

Granta 109: Work, forthcoming in January 2010, features a new essay by McCann.