2020 National Book Awards Longlists
Longlists for the National Book Awards (NBA) in the Fiction, Young People’s Literature, and Translated Literature categories have been announced, including titles of genre interest.
The Fiction category includes Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Ecco), If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan (Norton), A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (Norton), and Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Pantheon).
The Young People’s Literature category includes King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender (Scholastic), Trowbridge Road by Marcella Pixley (Candlewick), The Way Back by Gavriel Savit (Knopf), and Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (Macmillan/Swoon).
The Translated Literature category includes The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated anonymously (Europa); The Helios Disaster by Linda Boström Knausgård, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (World Editions); Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes (New Directions); The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan, translated by N. Kalyan Raman (Black Cat); and Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo, translated by Jamie Chang (Liveright).
Longlists for non-fiction and poetry were also announced.
388 books were submitted for the Fiction category, 130 books for Translated Literature, and 311 books for Young People’s Literature. The 2020 Fiction judges are Roxane Gay (chair), Cristina Henríquez, Laird Hunt, Rebecca Makkai, and Keaton Patterson. The Translated Literature judges are Heather Cleary, John Darnielle, Anne Ishii, Brad Johnson, and Dinaw Mengestu (chair). The Young People’s Literature judges are Randy Ribay, Neal Shusterman, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Joan Trygg (chair), and Colleen AF Venable.
Finalists will be announced October 6, 2020, and winners will be announced via virtual ceremony on November 18, 2020. Each finalist will receive a prize of $1,000, a medal, and a citation, and each of the category winners will receive $10,000 and a bronze sculpture.
For more information, including announcement dates and the complete lists of finalists, see the National Book Foundation site.
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