This week, the National Book Foundation is announcing the 2020 National Book Award longlists. The five finalists for each award will be named on October 6, and the winners for each will be announced during a virtual ceremony on November 18.

The longlists are as follows:

Fiction

Nonfiction

Poetry

  • The Galleons by Rick Barot (Milkweed Editions)
  • A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (New Directions)
  • Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (Noemi Press)
  • Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount (Four Way Books)
  • Obit by Victoria Chang (Copper Canyon Press)
  • DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi (Wave Books)
  • Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody (Omnidawn Publishing)
  • Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral (Graywolf Press)
  • Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz (Graywolf Press)
  • The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Wesleyan University Press)

Translated Literature

  • The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar and translated from the Persian by Anonymous (Europa Editions)
  • The Helios Disaster by Linda Boström Knausgård and translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles (World Editions)
  • High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann and translated from the German by Anne Posten (Catapult )
  • The Family Clause by Jonas Hassen Khemiri and translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies (FSG)
  • Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor and translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (New Directions)
  • Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri and translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles (Riverhead)
  • The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan and translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic)
  • Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo and translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang (Liveright)
  • The Bitch by Pilar Quintana and translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (World Editions)
  • Minor Detail by Adania Shibli and translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette (New Directions)

Young People’s Literature

  • King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender (Scholastic Press)
  • We Are Not Free by Traci Chee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
  • Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box by Evette Dionne (Viking)
  • Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth (Levine Querido)
  • Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh (Dutton)
  • When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed (Dial)
  • Trowbridge Road by Marcella Pixley (Candlewick)
  • How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology, and Daring Feats of Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Adventure by John Rocco (Crown)
  • The Way Back by Gavriel Savit (Knopf)
  • Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (Macmillan/Swoon Reads)

A total of 388 books were submitted for this year’s National Book Award for fiction. The judges are Roxane Gay (chair), Cristina Henríquez, Laird Hunt, Rebecca Makkai, and Keaton Patterson.

Publishers submitted a total of 609 books for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The judges are James Goodman, Yunte Huang, Hannah Oliver Depp, David Treuer, and Terry Tempest Williams (chair).

A total of 254 books were submitted for this year's National Book Award for Poetry. The judges are Rigoberto González, John Hennessy, Layli Long Soldier (chair), Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Elizabeth Willis.

Publishers submitted a total of 130 books for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The judges are Heather Cleary, John Darnielle, Anne Ishii, Brad Johnson, and Dinaw Mengestu (chair). 

A total of 311 books were submitted for this year’s National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The judges are Randy Ribay, Neal Shusterman, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Joan Trygg (chair), and Colleen AF Venable.