Following two years of virtual ceremonies, the 2022 Kirkus Prizes will be awarded Thursday at 7 p.m. Eastern Time in a hybrid event taking place in person at the Austin Central Library in Texas and simultaneously livestreamed on YouTube.
This is the ninth year for the $50,000 prizes, which are some of the richest literary awards in the world. The Kirkus Prize is awarded in three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Winners will also receive a handmade trophy designed by the London team of Vezzini & Chen.
The finalists for this year’s fiction award are Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser; Trust by Hernan Diaz; God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu; Mecca by Susan Straight; Scattered All Over the Earth, written by Yoko Tawada and translated by Margaret Mitsutani; and The Books of Jacob, written by Olga Tokarczuk and translated by Jennifer Croft.
The judges for this year’s fiction prize are author Deesha Philyaw, bookseller Luis Correa, Kirkus critic Wendy Smith, and Kirkus fiction editor Laurie Muchnick.
The nonfiction finalists are By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham; The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle To Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris; The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein; These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett; In Sensorium: Notes for My People by Tanaïs; and An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong.
The judges for the nonfiction award are author Hanif Abdurraqib, librarian Lillian Dabney, Kirkus critic Sarah Norris, and Kirkus nonfiction editor Eric Liebetrau.
The finalists for the young readers’ literature prize are divided into three subcategories of two books each. In picture books, author Jacqueline Woodson and illustrator Rafael López were named finalists for The Year We Learned To Fly; along with author Betina Birkjær, illustrator Anna Margrethe Kjærgaard, and translator Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov for Coffee, Rabbit, Snowdrop, Lost.
The middle-grade finalists are Niki Smith for The Golden Hour and Anne Ursu for The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, while the young adult finalists are Harmony Becker for Himawari House and Rimma Onoseta for How You Grow Wings. The judging panel for the young readers’ literature prize is made up of author/illustrator Jerry Craft, librarian and educator Junko Yokota, Kirkus critic Alec B. Chunn, and Kirkus young readers’ editor Laura Simeon.
Two Kirkus Prize winners from past virtual ceremonies are expected to attend the in-person event in Austin: Raven Leilani, who won the fiction prize in 2020 for her novel, Luster, and Christina Soontornvat, who won the young readers’ literature prize in 2021 for All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team.
The evening will also include a tribute to children’s book author and illustrator Ashley Bryan, who died in February at the age of 98. Bryan’s book Freedom Over Me was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in young readers’ literature in 2016.
Readers are invited to watch the ceremony on Kirkus’ YouTube channel.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
