2024 National Book Award Longlists

Longlists for the National Book Awards (NBA) have been announced. The Fiction, Nonfiction, Young Adult, and Translated Literature categories include titles and authors of genre interest.

Fiction

• Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda (Norton)
• James, Percival Everett (Doubleday)

Nonfiction

• Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are, Rebecca Boyle (Random House)
• Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie (Random House)
• Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (Tiny Reparations)

Young People’s Literature

• Ariel Crashes a Train, Olivia A. Cole (Labyrinth Road)
• Buffalo Dreamer, Violet Duncan (Nancy Paulsen)
• Wild Dreamers, Margarita Engle (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
• The First State of Being, Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow)
• Everything We Never Had, Randy Ribay (Kokila)

Translated Literature

• The Book Censor’s Library, Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Restless Books)
• On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland (New Directions)
• Woodworm, Layla Martínez, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Two Lines Press)
• Pink Slime, Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary (Scribner)

The judges for the Fiction award are Jamie Ford, Lauren Groff (chair), Zeyn Joukhadar, Chawa Magaña, and Reginald McKnight. Judges for the Nonfiction award are Brenda J. Child, Anand Giridharadas, Tressie McMillan Cottom (chair), Timothy Morton, and Arvin Ramgoolam. Judges for the Young People’s Literature award are Rose Brock, Huda Fahmy, Leah Johnson, Mike Jung, and Brein Lopez (chair). Judges for the translated Fiction award are Aron Aji, Jennifer Croft, Jhumpa Lahiri (chair), Gary Lovely, and Julia Sanches.

Finalists will be announced October 1, 2024, and winners will be honored at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 20, 2024.

For more information, including the complete lists of finalists, see the National Book Foundation site.

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