Countdown to Major Book Awards This Fall

Besides colorful foliage, a crisp chill in the air and pumpkin spice lattes, fall brings with it some major literary accolades bestowed on writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young adult literature. On Tuesday, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction judges revealed their short list of finalists, while the National Book Foundation announced the long list of candidates for the poetry category in the National Book Awards.

The Man Booker Prize has been awarded since 1969, but up until last year it was open only to writers from the U.K. and Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe. This will be the second year that writers of any nationality who produce work in English published in the U.K. are eligible. The six finalists are:

Marlon James (Jamaica), for A Brief History of Seven Killings
Tom McCarthy (U.K.), for Satin Island
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria), for The Fishermen
Sunjeev Sahota (U.K.), for The Year of the Runaways
Anne Tyler (U.S.), for A Spool of Blue Thread
Hanya Yanagihara (U.S.), for A Little Life

"Only on rare occasions does celebration come so closely aligned with regret. The regret of what we left out was tempered by the enormous excitement we have in presenting the six books on the short list," this year's chair of judges, Michael Wood, says in a press release. "The writers on the short list present an extraordinary range of approaches to fiction. They come from very different cultures and are themselves at very different stages of their careers."

From the short list of six, the judges will choose one winner, to be announced at a black tie dinner in London on October 13, with the BBC broadcasting the ceremony. Last year, Richard Flanagan of Australia took home the prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Also on Tuesday, the long list for the National Book Award in poetry was revealed by The New Yorker, the National Book Foundation's partner this year for the long list announcements. The list:

Ross Gay, for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Amy Gerstler, for Scattered at Sea
Marilyn Hacker, for A Stranger'​s Mirror
Terrance Hayes, for How to Be Drawn
Jane Hirshfield, for The Beauty
Robin Coste Lewis, for Voyage of the Sable Venus
Ada Limón, for Bright Dead Things
Patrick Phillips, for Elegy for a Broken Machine
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, for Heaven
Lawrence Raab, for Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts

That list comes one day after the foundation released its long list for the prize in young adult literature:

Becky Albertalli, for Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
M.T. Anderson, for Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad
Ali Benjamin, for The Thing About Jellyfish
Rae Carson, for Walk on Earth a Stranger
Gary Paulsen, for This Side of Wild: Mutts, Mares, and Laughing Dinosaurs
Laura Ruby, for Bone Gap
Ilyasah Shabazz, with Kekla Magoon, for X: A Novel
Steve Sheinkin, for Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War
Neal Shusterman, for Challenger Deep
Noelle Stevenson, for Nimona

The foundation is scheduled to reveal the long lists for nonfiction and fiction on Wednesday and Thursday mornings, respectively. The committee of judges for each category will announce its finalists on October 14, the day after the Man Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded, and winners will be crowned November 18 at a gala dinner and ceremony in New York City.

Last year the event was live-streamed online, as Phil Klay took the award in fiction for Redeployment, Evan Osnos won in nonfiction for Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China; Louise Glück won in poetry for Faithful and Virtuous Night; and Jacqueline Woodson won in young people's literature for Brown Girl Dreaming.