The National Book Foundation has announced the longlists for the 77th National Book Awards, recognizing books across Fiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. The Fiction longlist includes Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17, Kimberly Blaeser’s Red Ants, Edwidge Danticat’s Dèy, Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, Louise Erdrich’s Python’s Kiss, Marlon James’s The Disappearers, Valeria Luiselli’s Beginning Middle End, Alexander Maksik’s Passengers, Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation, and Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden. The Fiction judges are Matt Bell, Caro De Robertis, Danielle King, Akhil Sharma, and Diane Wilson, with De Robertis serving as chair.
The Poetry longlist brings together ten collections, including Victoria Chang’s Tree of Knowledge, Carolina Ebeid’s Hide, Brenda Hillman’s Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation, Richie Hofmann’s The Bronze Arms, Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, Layli Long Soldier’s We, Jonah Mixon-Webster’s Promise/Threat, Jake Rose’s JOAN, Jake Skeets’s Horses, and Susan Stewart’s Bramble. The Translated Literature longlist similarly features ten books translated into English from Russian, Spanish, French, Norwegian, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, and other languages. Among them are Egana Djabbarova’s My Dreadful Body, translated by Lisa C. Hayden; Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman; Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Pure Men, translated by Lara Vergnaud; Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells, translated by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao; and Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza, translated by Leri Price.
Young People’s Literature completes the four announced longlists with books including Delali Adjoa’s The Free Verse Society, Elana K. Arnold’s Holloway, T. A. Chan’s The Celestial Seas, Tae Keller’s When Tomorrow Burns, Keala Kendall’s That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels’s The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America, Chanel Miller’s The Moon Without Stars, Eric Darnell Pritchard and Shannon Wright’s Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams, Julian Randall’s Shook, and Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr’s Life on the Moon. The four categories are being judged by separate panels of writers, editors, educators, translators, and literary professionals. The National Book Awards will continue through subsequent finalist and winner announcements, culminating in the 77th annual ceremony.
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