Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky Among National Book Award Finalists

Bookshelf Image by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images

By Talya Zax October 8, 2019

Finalists for the National Book Awards, winners of which will be announced on November 20, include Ilya Kaminsky, László Krasznahorkai and Carolyn Forché.

Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-born Jewish poet, is nominated for “Deaf Republic,” his second full-length poetry collection. Krasznahorkai, a Jewish Hungarian novelist, is a finalist in the category of fiction in translation, for his “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” translated by Ottilie Mulzet. And Forché, who cites Jewish mysticism as a spiritual influence, is nominated for “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance,” titled after the first line of her most famous poem, “The Colonel.”

The list of finalists, announced this morning in Vanity Fair, arrives after the announcement of longlisted nominees in September.

Other finalists include Booker Prize winner Marlon James for the novel “Black Leopard Red Wolf” and 2015 National Book Award-winning young adult author Laura Ruby’s WWII-era “Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All.” Longlisted works that didn’t make the shortlist include Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel “Fleishman is in Trouble,” Ariana Reines’s poetry collection “A Sand Book” and Olga Tokarczuk’s “Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead,” translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO