Posted on October 3, 2024
The finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards have been announced by the National Book Foundation. There are twenty-five finalists contending in the five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.
The 2024 Finalists will read from their work at the National Book Awards Finalist Reading on the evening of Tuesday, November 19 at NYU Skirbal. The event will be Brittany Luse, an award-winning journalist, cultural critic, and host of It’s Been a Minute from NPR. The winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 20 at the 75th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.
Winners of the National Book Awards receive $10,000, a bronze medal and statue. The finalists receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. The prizes are split in the translated literature category.
Fiction
- ’Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots (Norton / W. W. Norton & Company)
- Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! (Knopf / Penguin Random House)
- Percival Everett, James (Doubleday / Penguin Random House)
- Miranda July, All Fours (Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House)
- Hisham Matar, My Friends (Random House / Penguin Random House)
Nonfiction
- Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books / Penguin Random House)
- Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers)
- Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown / Penguin Random House)
- Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House / Penguin Random House)
- Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender (Harper / HarperCollins Publishers)
Poetry
- Anne Carson, Wrong Norma (New Directions Publishing)
- Fady Joudah, […] (Milkweed Editions)
- m.s. RedCherries, mother (Penguin Books / Penguin Random House)
- Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press)
- Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living (University of Akron Press)
Translated Literature
- Bothayna Al-Essa, The Book Censor’s Library, Translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Restless Books)
- Linnea Axelsson, Ædnan, Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (Knopf / Penguin Random House)
- Fiston Mwanza Mujila, The Villain’s Dance, Translated from the French by Roland Glasser (Deep Vellum / Deep Vellum Publishing)
- Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue, Translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King (Graywolf Press)
- Samar Yazbek, Where the Wind Calls Home, Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, (World Editions)
Young People’s Literature
- Violet Duncan, Buffalo Dreamer (Nancy Paulsen Books / Penguin Random House)
- Josh Galarza, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (Henry Holt and Company (BYR) / Macmillan Publishers)
- Erin Entrada Kelly, The First State of Being (Greenwillow Books / HarperCollins Publishers)
- Shifa Saltagi Safadi, Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House)
- Angela Shanté, The Unboxing of a Black Girl (Page Street Publishing)
There are also two lifetime achievement awards. Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize winning author, will receive the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. W. Paul Coates, publisher and founder of Black Classic Press, will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
The 2024 National Book Awards longlist was published earlier this year in The New Yorker.
Image: National Book Foundation
