This year’s National Book Awards was a very special edition as the grand winner is an African-American writer, Annette Gordon-Reed, who has become the first African-American to have won the non-fiction section in the awards 59 year history. The book she wrote and for which she received the award is called The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

The book focuses on Thomas Jefferson’s slave family, and it is beautifully exposing all the injustice African-Americans suffered throughout American history. Race has always been a delicate subject and for untalented writers, this subject should be off limits, as writing about it requires a great deal of empathy and historical understanding.

The fiction award went to Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, a book about a legendary sugarcane farmer and murdered, who lived in Florida. The book received a lot of praise from literary critics and it is widely considered to be very imaginative, poetic and bold in its statements.

 The award for young People’s Literature went to Judy Blundell's What I Saw and How I Lied, a book portraying the relationship of a teenage girl with a soldier. The poetry award went to Mark Doty's Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems, which have been described to be profound and ferocious, at the same time.

The National Book Awards is a living statement that literature is not yet dead in the age of the Internet and speed of information. The fact that people are still interested in books shows that humanity still has time to stop, look around and enjoy the reality, as seen by others.