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Drew Barrymore to host US National Book Awards with Oprah Winfrey guest speaker

Barrymore and Winfrey both have long histories of championing books and reading.

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Drew Barrymore will host the 74th annual National Book Awards in New York, the National Book Foundation has announced.

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, whose honours include a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award, has praised books by Tina Fey and David Sedaris, among others.

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Oprah Winfrey is a previous winner of an honorary National Book Award (Amy Harris/Invision/AP/PA)

“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 November 15, in Manhattan, with prizes to be handed out in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literature in translation and young people’s literature.

Barrymore is not the first celebrity host of the US’s National Book Awards, the unofficial “Oscars” of the publishing world. Steve Martin hosted a handful of times in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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