2020 National Book Awards Finalists

Finalists 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), 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) and The Way Back by Gavriel Savit (Knopf).

The Translated Literature category includes Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri, translated by Morgan Giles (Riverhead).

Finalists 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.

Winners will be announced during a 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 the complete lists of finalists, see the National Book Foundation site.


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