The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The National Book Awards were established in 1936 by the American Booksellers Association, abandoned during World War II, and re-established by three book industry organizations in 1950. Non-U.S. authors and publishers were eligible for the pre-war awards. Since then they are presented to U.S. authors for books published in the United States roughly during the award year.
Alex Sanchez is a Mexican American author of award-winning novels for teens and adults. His first novel, Rainbow Boys (2001), was selected by the American Library Association (ALA), as a Best Book for Young Adults. Subsequent books have won additional awards, including the Lambda Literary Award. Although Sanchez's novels are widely accepted in thousands of school and public libraries in America, they have faced a handful of challenges and efforts to ban them. In Webster, New York, removal of Rainbow Boys from the 2006 summer reading list was met by a counter-protest from students, parents, librarians, and community members resulting in the book being placed on the 2007 summer reading list.
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
Susan Choi is an American novelist. She is the author of several acclaimed novels, including The Foreign Student (1998), American Woman (2003), and Trust Exercise (2019), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. Choi teaches creative writing at Yale University.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.
Riverhead Books is an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) founded in 1994 by Susan Petersen Kennedy.
Jonathan Eig is an American journalist and biographer. He is the author of six books, the most recent being King: A Life (2023), a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
Marlon James is a Jamaican writer. He is the author of five novels: John Crow's Devil (2005), The Book of Night Women (2009), A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), which won him the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019), and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022).
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Brit Bennett is an American writer based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel The Mothers (2016) was a New York Times best-seller. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half (2020), was also a New York Times best-seller, and was chosen as a Good Morning America Book Club selection. The Vanishing Half was selected as one of The New York Times' ten best books of 2020, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2020.
Bryan Washington is an American writer from Houston. He published his debut short story collection, Lot, in 2019 and a novel, Memorial, in 2020.
Brandon Taylor is an American writer. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa and has received several fellowships for his writing. His short stories and essays have been published in many outlets and have received critical acclaim. His debut novel, Real Life, came out in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2022, Taylor's Filthy Animals won The Story Prize awarded annually to collections of short fiction.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a 2020 debut novel by American author C Pam Zhang. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Adult Fiction. The book was published by Riverhead Books in North America and by Virago Press in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.
The Death of Vivek Oji is a 2020 fiction novel by Nigerian author Akwaeke Emezi. It was published on 4 August 2020 by Riverhead books, it narrates the life of Vivek Oji until his death. It is Emezi's second adult novel after Freshwater and the book received critical attention and was an instant New York Times best seller.
Chana Porter is an American playwright, novelist, and education activist. Her debut novel, The Seep, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.
Barbara Wilson is the pen name of Barbara Sjoholm, an American writer, editor, publisher, and translator. She co-founded two publishing companies: Seal Press and Women in Translation Press. As Barbara Sjoholm, she is the author of memoir, essays, a biography, and travelogues, including The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, which was a finalist for the PEN USA award in creative nonfiction. She is also a translator of fiction and nonfiction by Norwegian and Danish writers into English, and won the Columbia Translation Award and the American-Scandinavian Translation Award. As Barbara Wilson, she has written two mystery series and has won several awards for her mystery novels, including the British Crime Writers Association award and the Lambda Literary Award. She is known for her novel Gaudi Afternoon, which was made into a film directed by Susan Seidelman in 2001.
