The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the National Book Awards today:
- THE 2002 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FINALISTS
YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
M.T. Anderson, Feed (Candlewick Press)
Nancy Farmer, The House of the Scorpion (A Richard Jackson Book/Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Naomi Shihab Nye, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books/HarperCollins Publishers)
Elizabeth Partridge, This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life & Songs of Woody Guthrie (Viking/Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers)
Jacqueline Woodson, Hush (G.P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers)
FICTION
Mark Costello, Big If (W.W. Norton & Company)
Julia Glass, Three Junes (Pantheon Books)
Adam Haslett, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
Martha McPhee, Gorgeous Lies (Harcourt, Inc.)
Brad Watson, The Heaven of Mercury (W.W. Norton & Company)
POETRY
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California Press)
Sharon Olds, The Unswept Room (Alfred A. Knopf)
Alberto Ríos, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press)
Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Shadow of Heaven (W.W. Norton & Company)
NONFICTION
Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf)
Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution (Basic Books/Perseus Books Group)
Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Metropolitan Books/
Henry Holt & Co.)
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (Viking Penguin)
Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes (Houghton Mifflin Company)
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2002 National Book Awards/October 16, 2002
- At the National Book Awards Ceremony and Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 20, at 6:30 p.m. at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in midtown Manhattan, these authors will be honored and judges will announce the Winners in each of the four categories. The evening will benefit the Awards' institutional sponsor, the National Book Foundation, which runs dozens of educational outreach programs throughout the year for readers and writers across the country.
Also that evening, the Board of Directors of the Foundation will confer its 2002 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters upon Philip Roth, who will deliver an address to an audience of 1,000 authors, editors, publishers, friends, and supporters of books and book publishing.
Actor and author Steve Martin will, for the fourth consecutive year, serve as Master of Ceremonies.
In making the Finalists announcement, Foundation Executive Director Neil Baldwin commented: "Each of these authors has created a work of exceptional merit that resonated in a distinctive way with the judging panels surveying the ever-changing and vast terrain of the American literary landscape." Baldwin also noted the strong number of entries submitted this year: 993 titles from 183 publishers and imprints.
Article comments
1 - Sean Hackbarth
I see Caro taking the nonfiction award. That bio had quite the buzz when it came out. I heard quite a number of people took it with them on their summer vacations. Whether they actually read it is another story.