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The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel longlisted for 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal

CBC Books | | Posted: October 27, 2020 5:59 PM | Last Updated: October 27, 2020

Image | The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Caption: The Glass Hotel is a novel by Emily St. John Mandel. (HarperCollins, Sarah Shatz)

Emily St. John Mandel, a Canadian writer currently living in New York, has made the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for her novel The Glass Hotel.
The medal, which recognizes literary excellence, is annually awarded to a work of fiction and a work of nonfiction.
The $5,000 U.S. ($6,693 Cdn) prizes are awarded by the American Library Association.
The Glass Hotel brings several narratives together as it tells a story of financial corruption, greed and a massive Ponzi scheme. Inspired by the Bernie Madoff financial fraud scandal, the novel is a character study of people who profit and the lives that are compromised as a result.
"The thing that fascinated me the most [about the Bernie Madoff scandal] was the staff involved. I was an administrative assistant for a very long time, in various places. My most recent job — the place I was working when the Madoff scandal broke — was a cancer research lab at the Rockefeller University in New York," Mandel said in an interview with The Next Chapter.
"I liked my co-workers. There's a real sense of camaraderie that you can get in any workplace. I found myself thinking, 'Who are these people who show up at work every morning to perpetuate a massive crime?'
The Glass Hotel is also shortlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Media Audio | The Next Chapter : Emily St John Mandel on The Glass Hotel

Caption: Emily St John Mandel on The Glass Hotel, her follow-up to her breakout novel Station Eleven.

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There are 26 books on the fiction longlist, including Hamnet & Judith by Maggie O'Farrell, which won the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction, Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi.
There are 20 books on the nonfiction longlist, including poet Natasha Trethewey's memoir Memorial Drive; Les Payne and Tamara Payne's biography of Malcolm X, The Dead Are Arising; and journalist Isabel Wilkerson's book about racism in the United States, Caste, which was selected for Oprah's Book Club.
The shortlists, which will be comprised of three books each, will be announced on Nov. 17.
The winners will be announced on Feb. 4, 2021.
The complete fiction longlist is:
The complete nonfiction longlist is:
  • Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
  • The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
  • Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick
  • Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs
  • The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper
  • The King of Confidence by Miles Harvey
  • Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
  • Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis by Jeffrey H. Jackson
  • Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
  • Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami
  • God's Shadow by Alan Mikhail
  • The Dragons, the Giant, the Women by Wayétu Moore
  • The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
  • Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
  • My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
  • Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
  • The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson
  • Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
  • One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965 by Jia Lynn Yang

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