Split Awards
The Translation award was split six times during its 1967 to 1983 history, once split three ways. Twelve other awards were split, all during that period.
- 1967 Translation
- 1971 Translation
- 1972 Poetry
- 1973 Fiction, History
- 1974 Fiction, Poetry, Biography, Translation (3)
- 1975 Fiction, Arts & Letters, The Sciences
- 1980 Translation
- 1981 Translation
- 1982 Translation
- 1983 Poetry, Children's Fiction paper, Children's Picture hard
Four of the ten awards were split in 1974, including the three-way split in Translation. That year the Awards practically went out of business. In 1975 there was no sponsor. A temporary administrator, the Committee on Awards Policy, "begged" judges not to split awards, yet three of ten awards were split. William Cole explained this in a New York Times column pessimistically entitled "The Last of the National Book Awards" but the Awards were "saved" by the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1976.
Split awards returned with a 1980 reorganization on Academy Awards lines (under the ambiguous name "American Book Awards" for a few years). From 1980 to 1983 there were not only split awards but more than twenty award categories annually; there were graphics awards (or "non-literary awards") and dual awards for hardcover and paperback books, both unique to the period.
In 1983 the awards again went out of business, and they were not saved for 1983 publications (January to October). The 1984 reorganization prohibited split awards as it trimmed the award categories from 27 to three.
Read more about this topic: List Of Winners Of The National Book Award
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