2011 National Book Award Finalists Include Six Indie Next Great Reads

On Wednesday, the finalists for the 2011 National Book Awards were announced in Portland, Oregon, as part of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud morning radio program. This year’s list includes six titles chosen earlier this year by independent booksellers as Indie Next List Great Reads.

This year’s finalists are:

Fiction

• Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press) — A May 2011 Indie Next Great Read [1]
• Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (Random House) — A March 2011 Indie Next Great Read [2]
• Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House)
• Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books, an imprint of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington)
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA) — A September 2011 Indie Next Great Read [3]

 Nonfiction

• Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf Press)
• Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown and Company)
• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Company)
• Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Group USA)
• Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

 Poetry

• Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press)
• Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton & Company)— A 2011 Poetry Top Ten Pick [4]
•  Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Young People's Literature

• Franny Billingsley, Chime (Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)
• Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy (Marshall Cavendish)
• Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers)
• Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books)
• Lauren Myracle, Shine (Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams)— A Summer 2011 Children’s Indie Next Great Read [5] (This title was withdrawn as an NBA finalist on Friday, after BTW was published.)**
• Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) — A Spring 2011 Children’s Indie Next Great Read [6]

The winners will be announced at the 62nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 16. Actor, writer, and musician John Lithgow will host the event.

Winners receive $10,000 and a bronze statue; Finalists receive a bronze medal and $1,000.

Poet John Ashbery will receive the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, to be presented by poet Ann Lauterbach. Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International and a past president of the American Booksellers Association, will receive the Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community, to be presented by writer Walter Mosley.

 For more information about the 2011 finalists and upcoming National Book Awards Week events, visit www.nationalbook.org [7].

**Due to a mistake on the part of National Book Foundation staff on Wednesday, Lauren Myracle’s Shine was announced as a finalist for the 2011 awards instead of the judges’ choice of Franny Billingsley’s Chime. On Friday, Myracle was asked by NBF to withdraw her title from the competition “to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work.”