Finalists for the 2016 National Book Awards Announced

Posted on October 10, 2016

The finalists for the 2016 National Book Awards have been announced. The five fiction finalists are: The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder (Norton), News of the World by Paulette Jiles (Morrow), The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (Viking), The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday) and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson (Amistad).

The nonfiction finalists include Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell (The New Press), Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (Nation Books), Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Harvard University Press), The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House).

The finalists for the poetry award include Daniel Borzutzky for The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press), Rita Dove for Collected Poems 1974 – 2004 (W. W. Norton & Company), Peter Gizzi for Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press), Jay Hopler for The Abridged History of Rainfall (McSweeney’s) and Solmaz Sharif for Look (Graywolf Press).

You can see a list of the finalists in all categories here.

Lisa Lucas, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, and David Haglund, the literary editor of newyorker.com, announced the finalists in a live stream. Take a look: Take a look: