Lydia Millet among finalists for U.S. National Book Awards
Hillel Italie | | Posted: October 6, 2020 5:03 PM | Last Updated: October 6, 2020
Stories of race, class and climate change were among the fiction finalists Tuesday for the 2020 U.S. National Book Awards.
The National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced five works in each of five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation and young people's literature.
The winners in each category will receive $10,000 U.S. ($13,279 Cdn), with the money divided equally between the author and translator for the translation category.
None of the authors have been finalists before, although American novelist Lydia Millet has previously been on the longlist.
Millet's A Children's Bible tells of a group of young people left to confront environmental disaster while the adults turn away.
Millet has previously been a finalist for the Pultizer Prize, and she won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for her novel My Happy Life.
In the nonfiction category, The Dead Are Arising marks the second time in the past decade that a Malcolm X biographer was posthumously cited by awards judges. The Dead Are Arising was co-authored by Tamara Payne and her father Les Payne, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who died in 2018.
In 2011, Manning Marable died just before the release of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
In translation, the finalists include Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Family Clause, which was translated from Swedish by Alice Menzies.
Judging panels of authors, critics and others in the bookselling community selected finalists from nearly 1,700 books submitted by publishers.
The winners will be announced during an online ceremony Nov. 18, 2020.
Honorary medals will be presented to author Walter Mosley and, posthumously, to Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy.
You can see the complete list of finalists below.
Fiction:
- Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
- A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
- Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Nonfiction:
- The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
- Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt
- My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
- How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker
Poetry:
- A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
- Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount
- DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi
- Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody
- Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Translated literature:
- High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, translated from German by Anne Posten
- The Family Clause by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, translated from Swedish by Alice Menzies
- Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles
- The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman
- Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
Young people's literature:
- King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender
- We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
- Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh
- When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed
- The Way Back by Gavriel Savit
With files from CBC Books.