Oakland native Tommy Orange continues to be showered in accolades. His debut novel, “There There,” has won a prestigious American Book Award.
“There There” (Knopf, $25.95, 290 pages) was among the most acclaimed literary works of 2018. It tells a story of modern-day Native Americans struggling with loss of identity in urban Oakland. Among its many fans is Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), who deemed the book “an astonishing literary debut.”
“There There” previously captured a PEN/Hemingway award for “distinguished first novel.” It also won a Center For Fiction First Novel Prize.The American Book Awards were announced Monday by the Before Columbus Foundation, founded in 1976 by Oakland author Ishmael Reed. Other winners include Jeffrey C. Stewart’s “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke,” Halifu Osumare’s memoir “Dancing in Blackness,” Ángel García’s poetry book “Teeth Never Sleep” and William T. Vollmann’s nonfiction work on climate change, “Carbon Ideologies.”
The educator and psychologist Nathan Hare was given a lifetime achievement award. His books include “The Black Anglo-Saxons” and “The Endangered Black Family.”
Orange, who was born and raised in Oakland, is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. He took seven years to complete “There There” while writing in Angels Camp, where he now lives. Before his book was accepted by Knopf, he had been published only once before — a short story in the literary journal “Yellow Medicine Review.”
In an interview last year with the Bay Area News Group, Orange, who was kicked out of Bishop O’Dowd High School and later graduated from Alameda High School. said, “I’m not one of those kids who grew up loving books. No one was telling me I had any intellectual promise.”
