“Before then, I felt it lacked a real reason for being,” Yu told Associated Press in a recent interview. “It seemed that reference to things in the past like the Chinese Exclusion Act (a racist law passed in 1882) had relevance. I started thinking, ‘This does still matter. This is a story you should try to tell.’”

The poetry prize went to Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, while Malcolm X biography The Dead Are Arising, by Tamara Payne and her father the late Les Payne, was cited for nonfiction. Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies won for young people’s literature. and Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles, took the prize for best translated work.

DMZ Colony combines poetry, prose and images in its exploration of the history between the United States and South Korea.

The award for The Dead Are Arising is the second time in a decade a Malcolm X biography has received a high honour for nonfiction and the second time the honour was, at least in part, posthumous.

The scholar Manning Marable died right before the 2011 publication of Malcolm X, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize and receive a National Book Award nomination. Les Payne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, died in 2018.

“This is such a bittersweet moment,” Tamara Payne said upon accepting the award Wednesday night. “I really wish my father was here for this.”

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Honorary medals were given on Wednesday night to mystery novelist Walter Mosley and to the late CEO of Simon & Schuster, Carolyn Reidy, who died in May at age 71.

Children’s author and current US Youth Ambassador for young adult literature Jason Reynolds served as emcee, and along with Bob Woodward and Walter Isaacson was among the Simon & Schuster writers who appeared in a taped tribute to Reidy.

Mosley, the first Black man to win the medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, spoke of his debt to such literary heroes as Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman and Ralph Ellison.

Because of the pandemic, one of publishing’s most high-profile gatherings was streamed online, with presenters and winners speaking everywhere from New York to Japan.

The traditional dinner ceremony is the non-profit National Book Foundation’s most important source of income and is usually held at Cipriani Wall Street, where publishers and other officials pay thousands of dollars for tables or individual seats.

The foundation instead has been asking for donations of US$50 or more. As of Wednesday evening, just over US$490,000 had been pledged from 851 donors.

“It’s hard in a pandemic. We were scared we wouldn’t be able to do this show,” said foundation executive director Lisa Lucas, speaking online from the children’s room of the Los Angeles Public Library.

Executive director since 2016, she will depart at the end of the year to become publisher for the Penguin Random House imprints Pantheon and Schocken. Her successor has not been announced.

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Along with the pandemic and the US presidential election, diversity has been an ongoing theme in the book world this year and remained so Wednesday night, from Lucas urging publishers to work at transforming a historically white industry to the winners themselves.

Winners in each of the competitive categories receive US$10,000, and other finalists US$1,000, with the money divided equally between the author and translator for best translated book.

Roxane Gay, Rebecca Makkai and Dinaw Mengestu were among the authors, booksellers and others in the publishing community who as awards judges selected finalists from more than 1,600 books – many of them read digitally because of the pandemic.