The National Book Foundation has announced the 25 finalists for this year's National Book Awards, in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literature in translation, and young people's literature.
This year's authors are a diverse group that includes several debuts — from Deesha Philyaw and Douglas Stuart in the fiction category, and Tommye Blount and Anthony Cody in poetry.
The awards ceremony will stream live on YouTube on November 18th, and will include two lifetime achievement awards: Edwidge Danticat will present the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to author Walter Mosley, and a posthumous award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community goes to publisher Carolyn Reidy.
As always, interested readers can hear this year's finalists read from their work at a special event at the New School on November 10 (which will also be available online.) You can find the full list — with links to our coverage — by scrolling down, or just click one of the categories to the right.
Fiction
Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind
Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible
Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
Nonfiction
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans
Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Jerald Walker, How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
Poetry
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars
Tommye Blount, Fantasia for the Man in Blue
Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony
Anthony Cody, Borderland Apocrypha
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
Translated literature
Anja Kampmann, High as the Waters Rise, translated from the German by Anne Posten
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Family Clause, translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies
Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station, translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles
Pilar Quintana, The Bitch, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
Young people's literature
Kacen Callender, King and the Dragonflies
Traci Chee, We Are Not Free
Candice Iloh, Every Body Looking
Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, When Stars Are Scattered
Gavriel Savit, The Way Back
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
