OCTOBER 1, 2024 — This year’s list of finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards saw works by Arab authors in four of the five categories:
Libyan-British author Hisham Matar’s My Friends was on the five-book shortlist for fiction;
Palestinian-American poets Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha were both finalists in the five-book-strong poetry category, Joudah for his […] and Khalaf Tuffaha for her Something About Living;
two books translated from Arabic were on the translated-literature shortlist: Kuwaiti author Bothayna Al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, co-translated by Sawad Hussain and Ranya Abdelrahman, and Syrian writer Samar Yazbek’s The Wind Calls Home, translated by Leri Price;
and Syrian-American children’s book author Shifa Saltagi Safadi made the five-book shortlist for young people’s literature with Kareem Between.
According to organizers, across the five categories, only one writer and one translator have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation. As they note: “Leri Price and Samar Yazbek were Finalists in 2021 for Planet of Clay, and, for her translations, Price was Longlisted in 2023 for No One Prayed Over Their Graves and a Finalist in 2019 for Death Is Hard Work, both written by Khaled Khalifa.”
The National Book Foundation announced its 25 finalists on Tuesday for awards across these four categories as well as nonfiction. The winners are set to be announced in November, when two lifetime achievement prizes will also be given out. One will go to author Barbara Kingsolver and the other to publisher W. Paul Coates, the publisher and founder of Black Classic Press.