Finalists in each category will be announced on October 3, 2023, and the winners will be announced at the National Book Awards ceremony and Benefit dinner on November 15, 2023.
By Hope Ibiale
African writers, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and David Diop, have been announced as some of the longlisted authors for the 2023 National Book Awards. The authors, who are the only Africans on the list, were nominated in the Fiction category and Translated Literature category for their works Chain-Gang All-Stars and Beyond the Door of No Return, respectively. Other longlisted books include Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, Ponyboy by Elliot Duncan, How to Communicate by John Lee Clark, and many others.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is an American-Ghanaian fiction author. His debut collection, Friday Black, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle: John Leonard Award for Best First Book and won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
David Diop is a Senegales-French novelist and lecturer, who specialises in 18th-century French and Francophone African literature. Diop received the 2021 International Booker Prize for his novel At Night All Blood Is Black, making him the first French-African author ever to win it. The novel was also shortlisted for ten French awards and also won other awards in several countries. His other works include 1889, l’Attraction universelle, and Frère d’âme.
(Read also: Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry Opens Submission for 2024 Edition)
The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of literary awards presented annually in the United States. Since its inauguration in 1950, the awards have recognised outstanding works in different literary categories such as Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Young People’s Literature, and Translated Literature. This year, fifty books were selected for the different categories. Finalists in each category will be announced on October 3, 2023, and the winners will be announced at the National Book Awards ceremony and Benefit dinner on November 15, 2023.
Each of the finalists will receive a cash prize of $1,000, a medal, and a citation. While the winners will walk away with $10,000 and a bronze sculpture.
Check the other longlisted authors here.