Ursula K. Le Guin gives a powerful speech at the National Book Awards

"I rejoice in accepting [this prize] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long: my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction," Le Guin said.

She reserved her most incendiary language for the recently resolved pricing dispute between Amazon and the publisher Hachette Book Group.

"We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa," she said. "And I see a lot of us, the producers, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant!"

"The crowd went wild," Mayer noted. "Really, you could have ended the evening there and almost everyone would have gone home happy — except for the Amazon contingent, who notably had no comment on Le Guin's speech, or the ribbing they endured throughout the night."

And at the after-party, the speech was still on people's minds, including Jynne Martin, the associate publisher at Riverhead books. As she told Mayer, it was "the most ferocious speech ever given at the National Book Awards."