The finalists for the National Book Awards 2020 have been announced. Selected from almost 1,700 submissions in five categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young people’s literature, and translated literature — the finalists are a strikingly fresh group. None of the authors on the list has been a finalist for a National Book Award before, and almost a third are debuts.
Due to the pandemic, the National Book Awards ceremony will be conducted entirely online on Nov. 18. The winners will receive $10,000 each (for the Translated Literature prize, the money is split with the translator); the finalists will receive $1,000 a piece. During the ceremony, novelist Walter Mosley will formally receive the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the late Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy will be honored with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
Here is the complete list of finalists:
Fiction
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Rumaan Alam, “Leave the World Behind”
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Lydia Millet, “A Children’s Bible”
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Deesha Philyaw, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies”
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Douglas Stuart, “Shuggie Bain”
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Charles Yu, “Interior Chinatown”
Nonfiction
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Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “The Undocumented Americans”
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Les Payne and Tamara Payne, “The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X”
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Claudio Saunt, “Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory”
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Jenn Shapland, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers”
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Jerald Walker, “How to Make a Slave and Other Essays”
Poetry
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Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, “A Treatise on Stars”
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Tommye Blount, “Fantasia for the Man in Blue”
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Don Mee Choi, “DMZ Colony”
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Anthony Cody, “Borderland Apocrypha”
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Natalie Diaz, “Postcolonial Love Poem”
Translated Literature
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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
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Kacen Callender, “King and the Dragonflies”
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Traci Chee, “We Are Not Free”
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Candice Iloh, “Every Body Looking”
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Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, “When Stars Are Scattered”
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Gavriel Savit, “The Way Back”
You can check out the Longlist for the US National Book Award here.
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