National Book Award longlists announced in 2 categories

NEW YORK – Stories ranging from retellings of the myths of Paul Bunyan and of Hans Christian Andersen's “The Snow Queen” to a look back at the Black Panther Party are among the 10 nominees on the longlist for the National Book Award for young people's literature.

On Wednesday, the National Book Foundation also announced the longlist for translated books, with fiction originating from Syria, Chile and South Korea among other countries. The French-language author Maryse Conde, often mentioned as a possible Nobel Prize candidate, received her first National Book Award nomination, at age 84, for her novel “Waiting for the Waters to Rise." Richard Philcox was the translator.

This week, the foundation will reveal its longlists for all five competitive categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, young people's literature and translation.

Judges will narrow the lists to five finalists on Oct. 5 and winners will be announced at a Nov. 17 ceremony in Manhattan. The nonprofit foundation, which presents the awards, plans to hold the event in person this year after making last year's ceremony virtual because of the pandemic.

In young people's literature, the list includes Anna-Marie McLemore's “The Mirror Season,” her contemporary version of “The Snow Queen”; and the graphic novel "The Legend of Auntie Po," in which Shing Yin Khor draws upon Bunyan and other folktales for a narrative that reflects on race, class and immigration. Darcie Little Badger's “A Snake Falls to Earth” is based in part on Lipan Apache storytelling traditions.

The other young people's nominees were Carole Boston Weatherford's “Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre,” with illustrations by Floyd Cooper, who died earlier this year; Safia Elhillo's “Home Is Not a Country”; Malinda Lo's “Last Night at the Telegraph Club”; Kyle Lukoff's “Too Bright to See”; Kekla Magoon's "Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People"; Amber McBride's “Me (Moth)”; and Paula Yoo's “From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry."

Translation nominees besides Conde include Elisa Shua Dusapin's “Winter in Sokcho,” translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins; Ge Fei's “Peach Blossom Paradise,” translated from the Mandarin by Canaan Morse; Nona Fernández's “The Twilight Zone,” translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer; and Bo-Young Kim's “On the Origin of Species and Other Stories,” translated from the Korean by Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell.

Others on the translation longlist were Benjamín Labatut's “When We Cease to Understand the World,” translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West; Elvira Navarro's “Rabbit Island,” translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney; Judith Schalansky's “An Inventory of Losses,” translated from the German by Jackie Smith; Maria Stepanova's “In Memory of Memory,” translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale; and Samar Yazbek's “Planet of Clay,” translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.