Bookworms around the world, check your reading lists.
Finalists for two significant literary awards, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the National Book Awards, were announced this week ahead of the fall award season.
For the second time in its history, Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize is open to writers of any nationality, generating a shortlist of authors from countries including the United States, Nigeria and Jamaica.
American novelists Anne Tyler and Hanya Yanagihara were among the six authors who made the shortlist for, respectively, “A Spool of Blue Thread” and “A Little Life.”
Marlon James, who wrote “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” is the first Jamaican-born author to be shortlisted. Chigozie Obioma, author of “The Fishermen,” is the second Nigerian to be nominated.
British authors Tom McCarthy and Sunjeev Sahota also were shortlisted, respectively, for “Satin Island” and “The Year of the Runaways.” McCarthy is the only author in the 2015 crop to have been nominated before, having been shortlisted for “C” in 2010.
The prize, which celebrates fiction written in English and published in the United Kingdom, previously was open only to authors from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth, Republic of Ireland and Zimbabwe. It carries a cash award and significant buzz. The shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and the winner will receive £50,000 more.
The winner will be announced on October 13 in London.
America’s National Book Awards nominations for fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature were announced this week, recognizing new and familiar names. The nominees are:
Fiction
Jesse Ball, “A Cure for Suicide”
Karen E. Bender, “Refund: Stories”
Bill Clegg, “Did You Ever Have a Family”
Angela Flournoy, “The Turner House”
Lauren Groff, “Fates and Furies”
Adam Johnson, “Fortune Smiles: Stories”
T. Geronimo Johnson, “Welcome to Braggsville”
Edith Pearlman, “Honeydew”
Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”
Nell Zink, “Mislaid”
Nonfiction
Cynthia Barnett, “Rain”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”
Martha Hodes, “Mourning Lincoln”
Sally Mann, “Hold Still”
Sy Montgomery, “The Soul of an Octopus”
Susanna Moore, “Paradise of the Pacific”
Michael Paterniti, “Love and Other Ways of Dying: Essays”
Carla Power, “If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran”
Tracy K. Smith, “Ordinary Light”
Michael White, “Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir”
Poetry
Ross Gay, “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”
Amy Gerstler, “Scattered at Sea”
Marilyn Hacker, “A Stranger’s Mirror”
Terrance Hayes, “How to Be Drawn”
Jane Hirshfield, “The Beauty”
Robin Coste Lewis, “Voyage of the Sable Venus”
Ada Limón, “Bright Dead Things”
Patrick Phillips, “Elegy for a Broken Machine”
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, “Heaven”
Lawrence Raab, “Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts”
Young People’s Literature
Becky Albertalli, “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”
M.T. Anderson, “Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad”
Ali Benjamin, “The Thing About Jellyfish”
Rae Carson, “Walk on Earth a Stranger”
Gary Paulsen, “This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs”
Laura Ruby, “Bone Gap”
Ilyasah Shabazz, with Kekla Magoon, “X: A Novel”
Steve Sheinkin, “Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War”
Neal Shusterman, “Challenger Deep”
Noelle Stevenson, “Nimona”