Salman Rushdie, Miranda July and Percival Everett are among this year’s finalists for the National Book awards.
Rushdie, who is receiving his first nomination, is competing in the non-fiction category with his bestselling memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. The book recounts the 2022 stabbing that cost him sight in one of his eyes and the use of a hand. The Observer’s Rachel Cooke called it an “extraordinary” book.
Knife is also set to be turned into a documentary from the Going Clear director Alex Gibney.
The 77-year-old is up against 2017 MacArthur fellow Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling; Pulitzer prize-winner Eliza Griswold’s Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church; philosophy professor Kate Manne’s Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia and Deborah Jackson Taffa’s acclaimed memoir Whiskey Tender.
The fiction category is led by Pulitzer-prize finalist Everett whose novel James re-imagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Guardian’s Anthony Cummins called it “gripping, painful, funny, horrifying” in his review. Everett’s book Erasure was recently turned into the big-screen comedy American Fiction, which won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
Everett will compete against July, the film-maker, artist and author, whose book All Fours follows a 45-year-old woman experiencing a sexual awakening. The rest of the category includes Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr!, Pemi Aguda’s short story collection Ghostroots and Pulitzer prize-winner Hisham Matar’s My Friends.
The finalists for the poetry award are Anne Carson for Wrong Norma, Fady Joudah for [...], m.s. RedCherries for mother, Diane Seuss for Modern Poetry and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha for Something About Living.
The category for young people’s literature features Violet Duncan’s Buffalo Dreamer, Josh Galarza’s The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky, Erin Entrada Kelly’s The First State of Being, Shifa Saltagi Safadi’s Kareem Between and Angela Shanté’s The Unboxing of a Black Girl.
The finalists for translated literature are Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain; Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel; Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The Villain’s Dance translated from French by Roland Glasser; Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King and Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.
There were a total of 1,917 books submitted for the awards this year. This year’s ceremony will take place on 20 November in New York City and each winner will receive $10,000.
Last year saw Justin Torres win the fiction award for Blackouts, and historian Ned Blackhawk won non-fiction for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History.
