The finalists for the National Book Awards were announced Tuesday morning, with Rumaan Alam, Douglas Stuart, and Natalie Diaz among the shortlisted authors.
Alam’s Leave the World Behind and Stuart’s Shuggie Bainare both finalists for the fiction prize, along with Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Life of Church Ladies, and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown.
In nonfiction, the finalists are Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans, Les Payne and Tamara Payne’s The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, Claudio Saunt’s Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, and Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave and Other Essays.
Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem made the poetry shortlist, along with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars, Tommye Blount’s Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, and Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha.
The young people’s literature shortlist features Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies, Traci Chee’s We Are Not Free, Candice Iloh’s Every Body Looking, Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed’s When Stars Are Scattered, and Gavriel Savit’s The Way Back.
The finalists for the translated literature prize are Anja Kampmann’s High as the Waters Rise (translated by Anne Posten), Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Family Clause (translated by Alice Menzies), Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (translated by Morgan Giles), Pilar Quintana’s The Bitch(translated by Lisa Dillman), and Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (translated by Elisabeth Jaquette)
The winners of the awards will be announced at an online ceremony on Nov. 18.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.