The National Book Foundation has announced its shortlists, which reveal the 20 finalists for the 2017 National Book Awards for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. The diverse lists include such established voices as Frank Bidart and Frances FitzGerald and up-and-coming literary favorites including Danez Smith, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ibi Zoboi.
The 2017 National Book Award shortlists are as follows:
Fiction:
- Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman (Knopf)
- The Leavers by Lisa Ko (Algonquin)
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central)
- Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf)
- Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
Nonfiction:
- Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Atria/37 INK)
- The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald (Simon & Schuster)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (Riverhead)
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (Doubleday)
- Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (Viking)
Poetry:
- Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- The Book of Endings by Leslie Harrison (University of Akron Press)
- WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)
- In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae (Wesleyan University Press)
- Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith (Graywolf)
Young People’s Literature:
- What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold (Lerner/Carolrhoda Lab)
- Far from the Tree by Robin Benway (HarperTeen)
- I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez (Knopf)
- Clayton Byrd Goes Underground by Rita Williams-Garcia (HarperCollins/Amistad)
- American Street by Ibi Zoboi (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray)
Publishers submitted a total of 1,529 books for this year’s National Book Awards: 394 in fiction, 553 in nonfiction, 245 in poetry, and 337 in young people’s literature. Decisions are made confidentially by four independent panels of judges.
The winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 15 at the 68th National Book Awards ceremony and benefit dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Two lifetime achievement awards will also be presented at the dinner: Annie Proulx will be recognized with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented by Anne Hathaway, and Scholastic chairman Dick Robinson will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community.
