NEW YORK – Novels by Nobel laureate Han Kang and Angela Flournoy and a memoir by Arundhati Roy are among the finalists for National Book Critics Circle awards.
The critics association announced nominees in eight competitive categories and three honorary winners, including the celebrated author-journalist Frances Fitzgerald, who will receive a lifetime achievement award.
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“Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top,” NBCC President Adam Dalva said in a statement Tuesday. “They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated -– and to be widely read.”
Han's “We Do Not Part” (translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) is a fiction finalist, along with Karen Russell's “The Antidote”; Katie Kitamura's “Audition”; Solvej Balle's “On the Calculation of Volume (Book III),” translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; and Flournoy's “The Wilderness.”
Roy is a nominee in autobiography for “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” with other books cited including Geraldine Brooks' “Memorial Days”; Beth Macy's “Paper Girl”; Hanif Kureishi's “Shattered”; and Miriam Toews' “A Truce That Is Not Peace.”
Finalists in other categories range from Viet Thanh Nguyen's “To Save and to Destroy” for criticism to Nicholas Boggs' “Baldwin: A Love Story” for best first book to Kevin Young's “Night Watch” for poetry.
Winners will be announced March 26.