Here’s the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Today, the American Library Association (ALA) announced the longlist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. The prize, established in 2012, honors the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year, and comes with a $5,000 purse. Previous winners include Valeria Luiselli, Adam Higginbotham, Rebecca Makkai, and Kiese Laymon.
Below, you’ll find the 46 titles (26 fiction, 20 nonfiction), selected by a committee of Booklist editors and contributors, members of RUSA’s Collection Development and Evaluation Section’s (CODES) Notable Books Council, and a representative of the American Booksellers Association.
Billy Kelly, the 2021 selection committee chair, said the following of the longlist:
This was unquestionably a challenging year for all the obvious reasons. There were times one didn’t feel especially like reading. The news was bleak; the outcomes were dire. And yet, in the end, reading proved to be just the balm one needs to sustain us, to give hope and strength and resilience in the face of an oppressively uncertain future. We know that reading has shown to increase empathy, to reduce stress, and even lower blood pressure. More importantly, however, we discovered that the diversity of voices with which we were able to so deeply engage, the breadth of fascinating subject matter in which we were able to so fully immerse ourselves proved to be the greatest testament to the human spirit. In that sense, 2020 was a great year to be a reader of outstanding books and the Carnegie committee sincerely hopes that others will find the same power we did in the books on this year’s longlist.
The shortlist for the fiction and nonfiction medals will be announced on November 17, 2020. And the two medal winners will be announced by 2021 selection committee chair Bill Kelly at the Reference and User Services Association’s Book and Media Awards (BMAs) event, which will take place online on February 4, 2021 from 3-4pm CST.
Congrats to all!
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2021 Longlist for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Fiction and Nonfiction
FICTION
Eliot Ackerman, Red Dress in Black and White
Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
Marie-Helene Bertino, Parakeet
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman
Kelli Jo Ford, Crooked Hallelujah
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendant Kingdom
Julián Herbert, Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino
Catherine Lacey, Pew
Raven Leilani, Luster
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel
James McBride, Deacon King Kong
Colum McCann, Apeirogon
Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season
David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
Jenny Offill, Weather
Masatsugu Ono, Echo on the Bay
Marilynne Robinson, Jack
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Graham Swift, Here We Are
Héctor Tobar, The Last Great Road Bum
Paul Yoon, Run Me to Earth
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
Bryan Washington, Memorial
NONFICTION
Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, The Undocumented Americans
Barbara Demick, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Michele Harper, The Beauty in Breaking
Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
Jeffrey H. Jackson, Paper Bullets
Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road
Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens
Alan Mikhail, God’s Shadow
Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women
Les and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Claudia Rankine, Just Us: An American Conversation
Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence
Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels
Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Jia Lynn Yang, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide
