The National Book Award was established in 1950. It is an American literary prize administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. Every year, the Foundation selects a total of twenty Judges, including five in each of the four Award categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature. First there is a long list, then a finalist list, and then the winners for each category are announced in November. Below are the 2017 finalists for each category.
Finalists for Fiction:
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman
The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Finalists for Nonfiction:
Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean
Finalists for Poetry:
Frank Bidart, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart
The Book of Endings by Leslie Harrison
WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier
In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith
Finalists for Young People’s Literature:
What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold
Far from the Tree by Robin Benway
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez
Clayton Byrd Goes Underground by Rita Williams-Garcia
American Street by Ibi Zoboi