FOR RELEASE, OCTOBER 8, 2019

2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FINALISTS ANNOUNCED

Twenty-five Finalists to contend for National Book Awards in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature

New York City, October 8, 2019: The twenty-five Finalists for the 2019 National Book Awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature (YPL) were announced today with VanityFair.com. The five Finalists in each category were selected by a distinguished panel of literary experts, and were advanced from the Longlists announced in September. Between the five categories, there are four writers who have been previously honored by the National Book Awards: Akwaeke Emezi, a 5 Under 35 Honoree, Toi Derricotte, a Literarian Award recipient in 2016 for her work with Cave Canem, Jason Reynolds, a 2016 YPL Finalist and 2017 YPL Longlister, and Laura Ruby, a 2015 YPL Finalist. Four of the twenty-five Finalists are debuts. 

Publishers submitted a total of 1,712 books for this year’s National Book Awards: 397 in Fiction, 600 in Nonfiction, 245 in Poetry, 145 in Translated Literature, and 325 in Young People’s Literature. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors; deliberations are strictly confidential.

The Winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 20 at the 70th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner, hosted by LeVar Burton, at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Two lifetime achievement awards will also be presented at the Awards dinner: Edmund White will be recognized with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented by John Waters, and Oren J. Teicher will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented by Ann Patchett. 

Finalists for Fiction: 

Susan Choi, Trust Exercise
Henry Holt and Company / Macmillan Publishers

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina: Stories
One World / Penguin Random House

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House

Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth
Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House

The Other Americans by Laila Lalami is set into motion when a Moroccan immigrant is killed under suspicious circumstances, with witnesses and survivors desperate for answers. In Julia Phillips’s Disappearing Earth, the search for two sisters who have disappeared from a remote Russian city ignites powerful questions about class, gender, and ethnicity. A debut short story collection set in Denver, Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine focuses on Latinas of indigenous descent and explores themes of ancestry, incarceration, illness, gentrification, and domestic violence with compassion and precision. The first installment of a trilogy from Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf incorporates African mythology in an epic story about a lost boy and a cast of fantastical characters searching for the truth. Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is about two students at a performing arts high school who fall in love, but leaves the reader questioning what happened to their relationship as well as the relationship between fact and fiction.

Finalists for Nonfiction: 

Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays
The New Press

Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House

David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Albert Woodfox with Leslie George, Solitary
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic

In What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, an unexpected encounter with a stranger brings poet Carolyn Forché to El Salvador where she is exposed to a country on the precipice of war. Focused on her family’s property in New Orleans, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells the story of how a family, a home, and a city has weathered tragedy, catastrophe, and inequality. Written with Leslie George, Solitary revisits the four decades Albert Woodfox spent in solitary confinement for a crime he didn’t commit, and how he—and the others in the Angola 3—turned injustice into a story of resistance and survival. Two titles explicitly address the experience of being othered in America, through a lens of history and sociology, respectively. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, the seventh book by Ojibwe author David Treuer, counters familiar narratives about America’s indigenous peoples, documenting survival and modern life, thereby connecting the past with those who are living out its legacy. In her collection Thick: And Other Essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom offers genre-bending analyses across many topics but remains united in her focus on the experience of black womanhood in America.

Finalists for Poetry: 

Jericho Brown, The Tradition
Copper Canyon Press

Toi Derricotte, "I": New and Selected Poems
University of Pittsburgh Press

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
Graywolf Press

Carmen Giménez Smith, Be Recorder
Graywolf Press

Arthur Sze, Sight Lines
Copper Canyon Press

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky imagines a protest where a gunshot literally deafens the populace. In her sixth collection Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith sounds a call for rebellion against American complacency and compromise. Jericho Brown’s The Tradition examines the growing presence of terror and trauma in our lives—and introduces a new poetic form called “the duplex.” With an eye towards the impending climate crisis, Sight Lines, Arthur Sze’s tenth collection, uses a broad spectrum of voices and forms to reflect on the imperiled natural world. “I”: New and Selected Poems includes more than 30 new poems by Toi Derricotte and uses an autobiographical perspective to respond to issues of race, gender, class, and other themes. 

Finalists for Translated Literature: 

Khaled Khalifa, Death Is Hard Work
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

László Krasznahorkai, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet
New Directions

Scholastique Mukasonga, The Barefoot Woman
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump
Archipelago Books

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House

Pajtim Statovci, Crossing
Translated from the Finnish by David Hackston
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House

Translated from the French by Jordan Stump, The Barefoot Woman is Scholastique Mukasonga’s second memoir about the Rwandan genocide and focuses on the loss of her mother. A family is forced to reunite to bury their father amid the wreckage of Syria’s civil war in Khaled Khalifa’s Odyssean black comedy Death Is Hard Work, which was translated from the Arabic by Leri Price. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder, is set on a mysterious island where everyday objects suddenly go missing and the memories of them are suppressed by the new eponymous police force. In Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, Ottilie Mulzet translates László Krasznahorkai’s ambitious sentences from the Hungarian that describe a disgraced baron’s return from exile and a professor’s retreat into the woods to regain control of his thoughts, all set against mounting nationalism and a looming apocalypse. And in Pajtim Statovci’s Crossing, which was translated from the Finnish by David Hackston, two friends flee from Albania to Italy hoping to find acceptance and a place that makes them feel whole.

Finalists for Young People’s Literature: 

Akwaeke Emezi, Pet
Make Me a World / Penguin Random House

Jason Reynolds, Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks
Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books / Simon & Schuster

Randy Ribay, Patron Saints of Nothing
Kokila / Penguin Random House

Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All
Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins Publishers

Martin W. Sandler, 1919 The Year That Changed America
Bloomsbury Children’s Books / Bloomsbury Publishing

Look Both Ways, a novel told in stories by Jason Reynolds, conjures entire worlds out of ten city blocks by sharing the adventures and mishaps that befall children on their ways home from school and is punctuated by illustrations from Alex Nabaum. In Randy Ribay’s novel Patron Saints of Nothing, a Filipino-American student’s life is upended when his cousin is murdered in connection with President Duterte’s war on drugs—and no one will talk about it. Justice and denial also factor into Akwaeke Emezi’s genre-bending first novel for young readers, Pet, in which a transgender teenager lives in a world where adults refuse to admit that the monsters surrounding them actually exist. Set during World War II, Laura Ruby’s Thirteen Doors, Wolves Behind Them All is a novel that chronicles the struggles of siblings abandoned at an orphanage. Martin W. Sandler looks back in history with 1919 The Year that Changed America, which uses archival images to explore a year that brought about Prohibition, suffrage, and a flood of molasses.

Finalists’ bios are below, and you can find more information on the authors, the National Book Awards, and the 2019 judges at nationalbook.org. 

The 70th National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner will be streamed via Facebook Live and also available at the Foundation’s website, www.nationalbook.org. Winners of the National Book Awards receive $10,000 and a bronze medal and statue; Winners and Finalists in the Translated Literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator; Finalists receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. The Benefit is hosted by a dinner committee including Lea Carpenter, Caitlin Hoyt, Deborah Needleman, Nicolas Niarchos, Tracy Sherrod, and Shelley Wanger.

The Awards Ceremony is the culminating event of National Book Awards Week. The celebration begins on November 18 with 5 Under 35, the Foundation’s celebration of emerging fiction writers selected by National Book Award Winners, Finalists, Longlisted authors, and former 5 Under 35 honorees. On the morning of November 19, the National Book Awards Teen Press Conference will take place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. On the evening of November 19, all Finalists will read from their books at the National Book Awards Finalists Reading at The New School. The Finalists Reading is open to the public; tickets are $10 and are available at The New School website.

Fiction Finalist Biographies:

Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010, she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and Camp Tiger, her first book for children, came out in 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is from Denver, Colorado. Her fiction has appeared in The American Scholar, Boston Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Idaho Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. Kali has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. She received her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida.

Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His New York Times bestseller A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, making him the first Jamaican to take home the award. The novel also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Minnesota Book Award, and has been translated into twenty-one languages. James is also the author of the novels, John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women. 

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits; Secret Son; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. A professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles.

Julia Phillips is a Fulbright scholar whose writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Moscow Times. She lives in Brooklyn.

Nonfiction Finalist Biographies:

Sarah M. Broom’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. A native New Orleanian, she earned her Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. She has been awarded a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, and fellowships at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and The MacDowell Colony. She lives in Harlem. 

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Lower Ed and Thick. Her work has been featured by The Washington Post, NPR’s Fresh Air, The Daily Show, The New York Times, Slate, and The Atlantic, among others. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, memoirist, editor, and translator. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her newest poetry collection, In the Lateness of the World, is forthcoming from Penguin Press in 2020. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Forché lives in Maryland with her husband, the photographer Harry Mattison.

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The author of four previous novels, most recently Prudence, and two books of nonfiction, he has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate, and The Washington Post, among others. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Albert Woodfox was born in 1947 in New Orleans. A committed activist while in prison, he remains so today, speaking to a wide array of audiences, including the Innocence Project, Harvard, Yale, and other universities, the National Lawyers Guild, as well as at Amnesty International events in London, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium. He lives in New Orleans.

Leslie George is a long-time journalist and award-winning radio producer. In her years working for WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York City, she was a reporter for “The Evening News,” a producer for the morning news program “Wake Up Call” with Amy Goodman and Bernard White, and the writer and host of the Sunday news program “Week in Review.” She won the Silver Reel Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for her documentaries Drug Mules in 1998 and The Emma Clark Story in 2004. She first interviewed Albert Woodfox in 1998. From those recordings she produced the documentary Freedom Behind Bars, which aired on Democracy Now! in 1999. Over the years she has written for a number of national magazines. She was an editorial director at iVillage, and worked as digital product director for WWD.com. She currently lives in Syracuse, New York. 

Poetry Finalist Biographies:

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is a winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection is The Tradition. His poems have appeared in Bennington Review, BuzzFeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.

Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections, including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is co-founder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. He is the author of Deaf Republic, a finalist for The Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Dancing in Odessa, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He has received a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of Be Recorder and five previous poetry collections, including Cruel Futures and Milk and Filth, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of the lyric memoir Bring Down the Little Birds, winner of an American Book Award. She teaches at Virginia Tech University and lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Arthur Sze has published ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines; Compass Rose, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light, winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu; The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago, winner of the American Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon, selected for the Western States Book Award. Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, and Spanish. Sze was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2017 and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.

Translated Literature Finalist Biographies:

David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama. He graduated from University College London with a degree in Scandinavian Studies and now lives in Helsinki where he works as a freelance translator. Notable recent publications include the Anna Fekete trilogy by Kati Hiekkapelto, Katja Kettu’s wartime epic The Midwife, four novels by ‘Helsinki noir’ author Antti Tuomainen, and Pajtim Statovci’s enigmatic My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing. His drama translations include three plays by Heini Junkkaala, most recently Play it, Billy! (2012) about the life and times of jazz pianist Billy Tipton. David was a regular contributor to Books from Finland until its discontinuation in 2015. In 2007, he was awarded the Finnish State Prize for Translation. David is also a professional countertenor and has studied early music and performance practice in Helsinki and Portugal. He is a founding member of the English Vocal Consort of Helsinki.

Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He has written numerous screenplays and is the author of four novels, including In Praise of Hatred, which was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is his eighth book published by New Directions.

Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and underdeveloped Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred. Her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, won the 2014 French Voices Award and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, her memoir Cockroaches was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose.

Ottilie Mulzet won the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below. She has also translated the work of Szilárd Borbély, Gábor Schein, György Dragomán, and László F. Földényi. She lives in Prague.

Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her works include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas; The Housekeeper and the Professor; Hotel Iris; and Revenge. She lives in Tokyo.

Leri Price is the translator of Khaled Khalifa’s In Praise of Hatred and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, as well as literature from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia.

Stephen Snyder, Kawashima Professor of Japanese Studies, serves as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Language Schools at Middlebury College. He has translated works by Yoko Ogawa, Natsuo Kirino, Miri Yū, Ryū Murakami, Kanae Minato, and Kenzaburō Ōe, among others. He is currently working on a study of the publishing industry and its effect on the translation and globalization of Japanese fiction.

Pajtim Statovci was born in Kosovo in 1990 and moved with his family to Finland when he was two years old. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Helsinki. His first book, My Cat Yugoslavia, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel and his second, Crossing, won the Toisinkoinen Literature Price. He received the 2018 Helsinki Writer of the Year Award.

Jordan Stump is a professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century French literature and literary translation. He is the author of Naming and Unnaming: On Raymond Queneau and The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction. He has also translated over 25 works of French fiction into English, primarily contemporary novels by Éric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Marie NDiaye, Antoine Volodine, among others. His translation of Marie NDiaye’s The Cheffe is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

Young People’s Literature Finalist Biographies:

Akwaeke Emezi makes their young adult debut with Pet on the inaugural Make Me a World list at Random House Children’s Books. An honoree on the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” list, a longlist nominee for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and a shortlist nominee for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, Akwaeke continues to receive accolades for their adult debut, Freshwater. The autobiographical novel also received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Los Angeles Times, among others, as well as starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist. Their sophomore adult novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, is forthcoming in 2020 from Riverhead Books.

Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author, a Newbery Award Honoree, a Printz Award Honoree, a National Book Award Finalist, a Kirkus Prize winner, a two-time Walter Dean Myers Award winner, a NAACP Image Award Winner, and the recipient of multiple Coretta Scott King honors. The American Booksellers Association’s 2017 and 2018 spokesperson for Indies First, his many books include When I Was the Greatest, Boy in the Black Suit, All American Boys (cowritten with Brendan Kiely), As Brave as You, For Every One, the Track series (Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu), and Long Way Down, which received both a Newbery Honor and a Printz Honor. He lives in Washington, DC.

Randy Ribay was born in the Philippines and raised in the Midwest. He is the author of Patron Saints of Nothing, After the Shot Drops, and An Infinite Number of Parallel Universes. He earned his BA in English Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his Master’s Degree in Language and Literacy from Harvard Graduate School of Education. He currently teaches English and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Laura Ruby is the author of some of the most acclaimed novels for children and teens in recent years, including the Printz Award-winning and National Book Award Finalist Bone Gap, the York series, the Edgar-nominated mystery Lily’s Ghosts, and the Book Sense Pick Good Girls, among others. She is on the faculty of Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program and lives in the Chicago area.

Martin W. Sandler is the award-winning author of Imprisoned, Lincoln Through the Lens, The Dust Bowl Through the Lens, and Kennedy Through the Lens. He has won five Emmy Awards for his writing for television and is the author of more than sixty books, four of which were YALSA Nonfiction Award finalists. Sandler has taught American history and American studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and at Smith College, and lives in Massachusetts.

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The mission of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, is to celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture. The Foundation approaches this work from three programmatic angles: Awards & Honors, recognizing exceptional authors, literature, and literary programs; Education & Access initiatives, helping young and adult readers develop a lifelong passion for books; and Public Programs, bringing acclaimed authors to communities nationwide to engage in conversations about books and the power of literature as a tool for understanding our world, cultivating meaningful discourse around the issues of our age. Information on all of the Foundation’s programs can be found online at nationalbook.org.

The National Book Awards, established in 1950, is one of the nation's most prestigious literary prizes and has a stellar record of identifying and rewarding quality writing. Many previous Winners of the National Book Awards are now firmly established in the canon of American literature, including Robert A. Caro, Ralph Ellison, Louise Erdrich, Denis Johnson, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Maurice Sendak, and Jesmyn Ward.