National Book Awards Finalists For 2020 Announced

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

• 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”

You can check out the Longlist for the US National Book Award here.

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