‘50 Shades’ Wins National Book Award

E.L. James’s inner goddess is surely doing the tango right now. The Fifty Shades of Grey author took home the prize for most popular book of the year at the U.K.’s National Book Awards last night, beating out well-regarded novelists Kate Mosse, JoJo Moyes, and Victoria Hislop. Hilary Mantel won the coveted Booker Prize for the second year in a row, while Claire Balding beat out Salman Rushdie for biography of the year. The accolade for Fifty Shades comes less than a week after James was crowned “publishing person of the year” by Publishers Weekly, which noted how the “success of the series continues to reverberate throughout the industry in a number of ways ... and turned erotic fiction into a hot category.”