The finalists for the National Book Awards have been revealed, with 25 books across five categories in contention for the annual literary awards.
Megha Majumdar made the fiction shortlist for A Guardian and a Thief, which is also a Kirkus Prize finalist, alongside Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother); Karen Russell for The Antidote; Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther; and Bryan Washington for Palaver.
Named finalists in the nonfiction category were Omar El Akkad for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This; Julia Ioffe for Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy; Yiyun Li for Things in Nature Merely Grow; Claudia Rowe for Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care; and Jordan Thomas for When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.
Kyle Lukoff was shortlisted in the young people’s literature category for A World Worth Saving, along with Amber McBride for The Leaving Room; Daniel Nayeri for The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story; Hannah V. Sawyerr for Truth Is, and Ibi Zoboi for (S)Kin.
The finalists in the translated literature category are On the Calculation of Volume (Book III), written by Solvej Balle and translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; We Are Green and Trembling, written by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and translated by Robin Myers; The Remembered Soldier, written by Anjet Daanje and translated by David McKay; We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, written by Hamid Ismailov and translated by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; and Sad Tiger, written by Neige Sinno and translated by Natasha Lehrer.
Named finalists in the poetry category were Gabrielle Calvocoressi for The New Economy, Cathy Linh Che for Becoming Ghost, Tiana Clark for Scorched Earth, Richard Siken for I Do Know Some Things, and Patricia Smith for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems.
The winners of this year’s National Book Awards will be announced at a ceremony in New York on November 19.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
