Using Awards Lists as a RA Tool: National Book Award Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

Last week the National Book Foundation released their long lists for the National Book Award. Along with my usual reminder to use these lists and their backlists especially to help patrons in a variety of ways, I want to point out the breadth of categories for this award.

The National Book Award can help an extremely wide range of readers with categories in Fiction, Nonfiction, Translated Literature, Poetry, and Young People's literature.

However, it is not just the range of categories, the nominees in these long lists are also among the most accesible of titles. The fiction and nonfiction titles, as usual, are solid suggestions for a general audience, they are NOT overly literary or obtuse. And as usual the translated titles are excellent options. One is even a horror book- Hurricane Season. From top to bottom, the books lysed here should be owned by every public library and handed out frequently to general readers.

Below is the full list via Publishers Weekly [because they has the best formatted list]; click here for the National Book Foundation's extensive site with easy access to back list nominees and winners.

2020 NBA Longlists Announced

By PW Staff | 

Sep 18, 2020

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

• Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Ecco)
• The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha (Tin House Books)
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (Riverhead)
• If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan (Norton)
• A Burning by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)
• A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet (Norton)
• The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw (West Virginia University Press)
• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Grove) 
• The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka (Knopf)
• Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Pantheon)

Nonfiction

• Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto by Michelle Bowdler (Flatiron)
• The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (One World)
• If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore (Liveright)
• The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright)
• Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territoryby Claudio Saunt (Norton)
• My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (Tin House Books)
• Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght (FSG)
• How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press)
• Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III (Liveright)
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House)

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.