The judges for the category this year are Matt Bell, the author of “Appleseed”; Caro De Robertis (Chair), the author of “Cantoras” and “The Palace of Eros”; Danielle King, the general manager of Left Bank Books, in St. Louis, Missouri; Akhil Sharma, the author of “Family Life”; and Diane Wilson, the author of “The Seed Keeper.”
In March, The New Yorker published an excerpt from “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young,” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s memoir of growing up in the Weather Underground. “I’ve spent years trying to untangle what I admire about my mother and father—their sacrifice and commitment, their radical solidarity with the Black freedom movement—from the violence and factionalism that often undermined their cause,” Dohrn writes of his parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who helped found the militant left-wing group during the Vietnam War. In “Seasons of Fury,” which The New Yorker excerpted in August, Rozina Ali considers a different political era, examining the post-9/11 expansion of the security state through the stories of four Muslim American families. Nine of the ten authors on the longlist are being honored by the National Book Awards for the first time; one nominee, Camonghne Felix, was long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2019.
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