Every year the National Book Foundation features a few fresh faces or unfamiliar names among the nominees for its annual literary prize. This time around, though, there's a twist. One of the actual National Book Award categories is something readers have not seen for quite some time: a prize for a work in translation.
Not since the early 1980s — that heady (and brief) era when the prize was renamed the American Book Award — has the National Book Foundation formally recognized translated literature. The group hasn't even added a new category, period, for more than two decades.
But this November, when the organization holds its ritzy gala in New York City, honors will be doled out to one exemplary work of fiction or nonfiction that has been translated into English and published in the U.S.
For now, 10 books remain in the running for that prize.
That's the case for the classic categories, as well. Check out the longlists of nominees for the National Book Awards below, and check back here on Oct. 10, when the finalists are expected to be announced.
Fiction
Nonfiction
Poetry
Translated Literature
Young People's Literature
Fiction
Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man
Jennifer Clement, Gun Love
Lauren Groff, Florida
Daniel Gumbiner, The Boatbuilder
Brandon Hobson, Where the Dead Sit Talking
Tayari Jones, An American Marriage
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Tommy Orange, There There
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People
Nonfiction
Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation
Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War
Victoria Johnson, American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
David Quammen, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth
Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Wobble
Jos Charles, feeld
Forrest Gander, Be With
Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Michael Martinez, Museum of the Americas
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of
Justin Phillip Reed, Indecency
Raquel Salas Rivera, lo terciario / the tertiary
Natasha Trethewey, Monument: Poems New and Selected
Jenny Xie, Eye Level
Translated Literature
Négar Djavadi, Disoriental
Translated by Tina Kover
Roque Larraquy, Comemadre
Translated by Heather Cleary
Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq
Translated by Dunya Mikhail and Max Weiss
Perumal Murugan, One Part Woman
Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
Hanne Ørstavik, Love
Translated by Martin Aitken
Gunnhild Øyehaug, Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life
Translated by Kari Dickson
Domenico Starnone, Trick
Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Yoko Tawada, The Emissary
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
Olga Tokarczuk, FlightsTranslated by Jennifer Croft
Tatyana Tolstaya, Aetherial Worlds
Translated by Anya Migdal
Young People's Literature
Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X
M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
Bryan Bliss, We'll Fly Away
Leslie Connor, The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle
Christopher Paul Curtis, The Journey of Little Charlie
Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hey, Kiddo
Tahereh Mafi, A Very Large Expanse of Sea
Joy McCullough, Blood Water Paint
Elizabeth Partridge, Boots on the Ground: America's War in Vietnam
Vesper Stamper, What the Night Sings
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