Oprah Winfrey will be a guest speaker at the ceremony
- The 74th annual National Book Awards is scheduled for Nov. 15, 2023, in Manhattan.
- The National Book Foundation announced on July 25, 2023, that Golden Globe winner Drew Barrymore will be hosting the ceremony.
- Oprah Winfrey, a previous winner of a National Book Award, is also set to be a guest speaker at the event.
Drew Barrymore, whose honors include a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award, will be presiding over a more literary ceremony this fall.
Barrymore will be hosting the 74th annual National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation announced Tuesday. And Oprah Winfrey, a previous winner of an honorary National Book Award, will be a guest speaker.
Barrymore and Winfrey both have long histories of championing books and reading. Winfrey's book club picks have helped dozens of works become bestsellers, while Barrymore has praised books by Tina Fey and David Sedaris, among others.
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Drew Barrymore is shown at the 24th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on March 19, 2023, in Washington. Barrymore will host the National Book Awards on Nov. 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf, File)
"Throughout their careers, Drew Barrymore and Oprah Winfrey have each demonstrated their enduring belief that books have the power to change readers’ lives — by opening doors, sparking conversations, and building community," David Steinberger, chair of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation, said in a statement. "This belief echoes the mission of the National Book Foundation to ensure that books have a prominent place in our culture."
The awards ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 15, in Manhattan, with competitive prizes to be handed out in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literature in translation and young people's literature. Barrymore is not the first celebrity host of the National Book Awards, the unofficial "Oscars" of the publishing world. Steve Martin hosted a handful of times in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
