This year, a whopping 1,223 books were submitted for the 62nd National Book Awards. Just this morning, the twenty finalists were announced in front of a live audience on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s morning radio program, Think Out Loud . At the start of the program, when asked what separated the National Book Award from other literary prizes, National Book Foundation executive director Harold Augenbraum noted that the finalists and winners are chosen only by “practitioners in the genre,” something relatively unusual among American book awards. 2001 Young People’s Literature winner Virginia Euwer Wolff commented, “It’s comforting to know we are being judged by people who do what we do.”
Each NBA Finalist will receive a medal and a prize of $1,000. The four winners, one each in the categories of Young People’s Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction and Fiction, who will be announced next month, will receive a $10,000 prize. Click through to see the 2011 National Book Award nominations and let us know your predictions for the winners in the comments!
Young People’s Literature Finalists
My Name is Not Easy , Debby Dahl Edwardson
Inside Out and Back Again , Thanhha Lai
Flesh & Blood So Cheap , Albert Marrin
Shine , Lauren Myracle
Ok For Now , Gary D. Schmidt
Poetry Finalists
Head Off & Split , Nikky Finnery
The Chameleon Couch , Yusef Komunyakaa
Double Shadow , Carl Phillips
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve , Adrienne Rich
Devotions , Bruce Smith
Nonfiction Finalists
The Convert , Deborah Baker
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution , Mary Gabriel
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern , Stephen Greenblatt
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention , Manning Marable
Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout , Lauren Redniss
Fiction Finalists
The Sojourn , Andrew Krivak
The Tiger’s Wife , Téa Obrecht
The Buddha in the Attic , Julie Otsuka
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories , Edith Pearlman
Salvage the Bones , Jesmyn Ward