If you are looking for new reading recommendations, you might start with this year's finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature from the National Book Foundation.
The five finalists in each category were selected by a panel of judges; the winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 20. Each winner will receive $10,000 as well as a bronze medal and a statue; each finalist will receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners and finalists in the translated literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator.
Five of the twenty-five finalists are debuts, and ten of the honored books are published by independent or university presses.
Fady Joudah - [...] (Milkweed Editions)
m.s. RedCherries - mother (Penguin Books)
Diane Seuss - Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press)
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha - Something About Living (University of Akron Press)
FICTION
’Pemi Aguda for Ghostroots (Norton)
Kaveh Akbar for Martyr! (Knopf)
Percival Everett for James (Doubleday)
Miranda July for All Fours (Riverhead Books)
Hisham Matar for My Friends (Random House)
NONFICTION
Jason De León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books)
Eliza Griswold for Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Kate Manne for Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown)
Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House)
Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender (Harper)
TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Bothayna Al-Essa for The Book Censor’s Library (Restless Books), translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain
Linnea Axelsson for Ædnan (Knopf), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Fiston Mwanza Mujila for The Villain's Dance (Deep Vellum), translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King
Samar Yazbek for Where the Wind Calls Home (World Editions) translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Violet Duncan for Buffalo Dreamer (Nancy Paulsen Books)
Josh Galarza for The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (Henry Holt)
Erin Entrada Kelly for The First State of Being (Greenwillow Books)
Shifa Saltagi Safadi for Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)
Angela Shanté for The Unboxing of a Black Girl (Page Street Publishing)
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