This year’s winners of the $10,000 prize, marking the sixty-third year of the National Book Awards, included Louise Erdrich in fiction (for The Round House), Katherine Boo in nonfiction (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity), David Ferry in poetry (Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations), and William Alexander in Young People’s Literature (Goblin Secrets). In addition to the NBA laureates, novelist Elmore Leonard and New York Times publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger, were each lauded with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Each of the winners poignantly reflected on their work during their acceptance speeches:

“Small stories in so-called hidden places matter,” said Boo, whose collection centered on the slums of Mumbai.

“I would like to accept this in recognition of the grace and the endurance of native women,” said Erdrich, whose novel depicted a crime on a Native American reservation in North Dakota.

“The literature of the imagination is important because it gives us a world large enough to contain alternatives, and it gives us hope,” said Alexander, quoting Ursula Le Guin.

Ferry, the oldest winner this year at 88, perhaps cynically remarked that his win was “pre-posthumous.”

Finalists for fiction:

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

Finalists for poetry:

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic

Susan Wheeler, Meme

Finalists for Nonfiction:

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East

For videos of this year’s ceremony, information on this year’s winners, and more, visit http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2012.html#.ULPNOuYqYnB