Here are your 2015 National Book Award winners

Mr. Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, dedicated the award to Prince Jones, a college friend of his who was shot to death by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal. His speech focused mainly on his time as a National Book Award judge and on the other nominees, who he praised effusively.

Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013 for his novel “The Orphan Master’s Son”, about a young man seeking his mother and an identity in totalitarian North Korea. I can’t secure the safety of my son.

Between the World and Me pulled ahead of Sally Mann’s Hold Still, Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus, Carla Power’s If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran, and Tracy K. Smith’s Ordinary Light.

“I was having a calm evening because this was not going to happen”, he said, accepting the award. She beat out a field of nominees that boasted a previous National Book Award victor (Terrance Hayes, in 2010) – and she did so with a book she published even while studying for her Ph.D. “In the depths of it, when he couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what was in his mind, in a moment of despair, he said to me, ‘Sometimes it feels like I’m at the bottom of the ocean screaming at the top of my lungs and no one can hear me'”.

In a 4 (out of 4) star review for USA TODAY, Elysa Gardner said of Fortune Smiles: “Johnson’s writing is as rich in compassion as it is in invention, and that rare combination makes Fortune Smiles worth treasuring”.

DeLillo’s speech came just days after the attacks in Paris, the kind of horror he had imagined in “Mao II” and so much of his work.

Robin Coste Lewis won in the poetry category for her debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus, a meditation on being a black woman in America, while the young people’s literature prize went to Neal Shusterman for Challenger Deep, about a teenager with schizophrenia. “Hopefully, this book can open up a dialogue about mental illness, to remove the stigma around mental illness and to show people who are suffering that they are not alone”.

“Here, I’m not the writer at all”, DeLillo said. These last two events, like the final awards ceremony, were livestreamed and can be replayed.

James Patterson, best known for his bestselling Alex Cross novels, was presented with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

“Let’s find a way to make sure there’s another generation of readers out there”, Patterson said in his acceptance speech, “and bookstores, and libraries, and healthy flourishing publishers”.

Writers James Patterson and Don DeLillo were also recognized at the ceremony Wednesday night, Patterson for his philanthropic efforts and DeLillo for “distinguished contribution to American letters”.