The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final "National Book Awards Ceremony" every November, the National Book Foundation presents the NBAs and two lifetime achievement awards to people.

The National Book Awards were established in 1936 by the American Booksellers Association, abandoned during World War II, and re-established by three book industry organizations in 1950. Non-U.S. authors and publishers were eligible for the pre-war awards. Now they are presented to U.S. authors for books published in the United States roughly during the award year.

The nonprofit National Book Foundation was established in 1988 to administer and enhance the Book Awards and "move beyond [them] into the fields of education and literacy", primarily by sponsoring public appearances by writers. Its mission is "to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of good writing in America."

There were 1,115 books nominated for the four 2010 awards, led by the Nonfiction category with 435 nominations. The 2011 ceremony was held on November 16 in New York City.

A literary award is an award presented to an author who has written a particularly lauded piece or body of work. There are awards for forms of writing ranging from poetry to novels. Many awards are also dedicated to a certain genre of fiction or non-fiction writing (such as science fiction or politics). There are also awards dedicated to works in individual languages, eg. the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spanish) and the Camões Prize (Portuguese). Most literary awards come with a corresponding award ceremony.

Some of the most notable literary prizes include the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Man Booker Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the Whitbread Awards, the Neustadt Prize and the Hugo Awards.

In recent years, some media corporations have sponsored new literary prizes, including the Quill Awards, which were first awarded in 2005 and The Ireland Funds AWB Vincent Literary Award in 2000.

There are also spoof awards, such as The Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award, the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, and the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction and Lyttle Lytton Contests, which are both given to deliberately bad sentences.

Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.

Called the "Godmother of Punk", her work was a fusion of rock and poetry. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.