Here are the finalists for the 2022 Kirkus Prize, one of the world’s richest literary awards.
The Kirkus Prize, now in its ninth year, is one of the richest annual literary awards in the world with the winners in each of the three categories receiving $50,000. The 18 finalists for this year’s Kirkus Prize were chosen from 512 young readers’ literature titles, 478 fiction titles, and 446 nonfiction titles.
Kirkus Reviews editor-in-chief Tom Beer says: “This year’s crop of Kirkus Prize finalists is an exhilaratingly diverse collection of books on a wide range of topics from authors across the United States and around the globe. Chosen by our hardworking judges from among the very best books our critics reviewed in the past year, these titles are truly on the top shelf of contemporary literature.”
Judged by Deesha Philyaw, bookseller Luis Correa, Wendy Smith, and Kirkus fiction editor Laurie Muchnick, the finalists for the 2022 Kirkus Prize in Fiction are:
Michelle de Kretser, Scary Monsters (Catapult)
Hernan Diaz, Trust (Riverhead)
Arinze Ifeakandu, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things (A Public Space Books)
Susan Straight, Mecca (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Yoko Tawada, trans. by Margaret Mitsutani, Scattered All Over the Earth (New Directions)
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. by Jennifer Croft, The Books of Jacob (Riverhead)
And judged by Hanif Abdurraqib, librarian Lillian Dabney, Sarah Norris, and Kirkus Nonfiction editor Eric Liebetrau, the finalists for Nonfiction are:
Margaret A. Burnham, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (Norton)
Lindsey Fitzharris, The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle To Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I
Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays (Harper/HarperCollins)
Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People (Harper/HarperCollins)
Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Random House)
In Young Readers Literature, judged by Jerry Craft, Junko Yokota, Alec B. Chunn, and Kirkus Young Readers’ Literature editor Laura Simeon, the longlisted writers are:
Betina Birkjær, illustrated by Anna Margrethe Kjærgaard, translated by Sinéad Quirke Køngerskov, Coffee, Rabbit, Snowdrop, Lost (Enchanted Lion)
Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Rafael López, The Year We Learned To Fly (Nancy Paulsen Books/Penguin)
Niki Smith, The Golden Hour (Little, Brown)
Anne Ursu, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy (Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins)
Harmony Becker, Himawari House (First Second/Macmillan)
Rimma Onoseta, How You Grow Wings (Algonquin)
The three 2022 Kirkus Prize winners will be announced in October.
