Hanya Yanagihara and Ta-Nehisi Coates win Kirkus Prizes

Hanya Yanagihara, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Pam Muñoz Ryan were announced as winners of the Kirkus Prizes late Thursday. The awards from Kirkus are still new -- it’s only their second year -- but they are richly rewarded, with $50,000 going to each of the winners.

Yanagihara won the fiction prize for “A Little Life,” a powerful novel of the intertwined lives of four men over three decades.

Coates, who recently was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, received the nonfiction prize for “Between the World and Me,” an incisive inquiry into race in America.

Ryan’s middle-grade book “Echo” won the prize for young reader literature. It ties together turbulent times in different eras with music.

The Kirkus Prizes were awarded in Austin, Texas, on the eve of the Texas Book Festival, which takes place this weekend. To be eligible for the award, books must be given a starred review in Kirkus, a magazine that provides advance independent book reviews to librarians and booksellers.

This was a good week for both Yanagihara and Coates, who also each made the cut to be finalists for the National Book Award on Wednesday.

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