Masha Gessen, Elliot Ackerman Among National Book Awards Finalists
Image by Misha Friedman/Getty Images
By Talya Zax October 4, 2017
Masha Gessen and Elliot Ackerman are among the finalists for this year’s National Book Awards.
Such an honor to be on this list. Thank you @nationalbook https://t.co/rjkb3yMrWd
— Elliot Ackerman (@elliotackerman) October 4, 2017
Gessen’s “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” released this week, is a finalist for the award in nonfiction. Ackerman’s sophomore novel “Dark at the Crossing” is a finalist for the award in fiction. It is both writers’ first appearance as finalists for the prestigious honors. In 2016, Gessen served as a nonfiction judge for the Awards.
Nominated alongside Ackerman for fiction are Lisa Ko for “The Leavers,” Min Jin Lee for “Pachinko,” Carmen Maria Machado for “Her Body and Other Parties: Stories” and Jesmyn Ward for “Sing, Unburied, Sing.”
Finalists in the nonfiction category, alongside Gessen, are Erica Armstrong Dunbar for “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge,” Frances FitzGerald for “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” David Grann for “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” and Nancy MacLean for “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.”
Winners of the Awards will be announced at a gala on November 15.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
