Hanif Abdurraqib, Tom Lin receive Carnegie literary awards

“When I was young, I treated the library as a place to pass time, to get lost in books that I could have otherwise not afforded to own, music that I could not have afforded to have,” Abdurraqib, 38, a recipient of an Andrew Carnegie Medal for “A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance,” said in a recent interview,

On Sunday, the library association awarded Abdurraqib the medal for excellence in nonfiction and gave the fiction prize to 25-year-old Tom Lin, the youngest ever Carnegie winner, for his debut novel “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu.” Each author receives $5,000 and will be honored in June at the association’s annual conference.

Abdurraqib is a Columbus, Ohio native who returned there a few years ago, and the library system has been a thread throughout — whether a quiet place for his imagination, a refuge during times he was short of money or a source for a favorite book. He currently lives near the Martin Luther King Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library and stops by often.

“I made a conscious decision to cut down on the amount of books in my home over the past two years, which means I get to return to the delight of getting books from the library — being on a waiting list and getting the email that my time has come,” he says. “All of that stuff. It’s like returning to the version of myself that looked at the place with a sense of endless wonder, which is cool.”