The finalists for the National Book Award are in, and this year, there’s more of them than ever before.
The 2018 National Book Award finalists are in. Here’s the full list.
This year, there’s an extra category.
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Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
For 2018, the National Book Foundation has added a new category for translated literature, in what seems to be an attempt to push back against the idea that Americans don’t read books from other countries. It doesn’t spotlight only unfamiliar names, though: The finalists in this category include Trick, translated by Namesake author Jhumpa Lahiri, who has written extensively about her decision to begin reading and writing in Italian after years of being celebrated for her beautiful English sentences.
The decision to create a new category spotlighting an often-overlooked type of book is consistent with the general tone of the National Book Awards for the past few years. Under the leadership of executive director Lisa Lucas, the National Book Awards have made a point of using their platform to elevate and highlight great books from small presses that might be otherwise ignored. So while this year’s fiction nominees include Lauren Groff’s much-discussed short story collection Florida, they also include books from Soho Press (Brandon Hobson’s Where the Dead Sit Talking) and Graywolf (Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man).
You can find the full list of this year’s finalists below. The winners will be announced on November 14.
Finalists for Fiction
Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man
Lauren Groff, Florida
Brandon Hobson, Where the Dead Sit Talking
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Finalists for Nonfiction
Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation
Victoria Johnson, American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic
Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Finalists for Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Wobble
Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghost Of
Justin Phillip Reed, Indecency
Jenny Xie, Eye Level
Finalists for Translated Literature
Négar Djavadi, Disoriental. Translated by Tina Kover
Hanne Ørstavik, Love. Translated by Martin Aitken
Domenico Starnone, Trick. Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Yoko Tawada, The Emissary. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights. Translated by Jennifer Croft
Finalists for Young People’s Literature
Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X
M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
Leslie Connor, The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle
Christopher Paul Curtis, The Journey of Little Charlie
Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hey, Kiddo
