University affiliates were named finalists in all four National Book Award categories today.
In nonfiction, Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore was nominated for Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. A Bancroft Prize winner for The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, she is a Pulitzer Prize finalist as well, for New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. Lepore is also coauthor of the historical novel, Blindspot: the adventures of a Scottish portrait painter who flees Edinburgh for Colonial Boston.
Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, G ’90, was nominated in the fiction category for The Lowland, also short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Bollingen Prize-winning poet Frank Bidart, A.M. ’67, was recognized for his new collection, Metaphysical Dog. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Mellon professor of humanities at Wellesley, Bidart is a previous National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist.
London-based Meg Rosoff ’78, whose earlier novel How I Live Now won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the American Library Association’s Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, was nominated in the young people’s literature category for Picture Me Gone.
The National Book Awards are part of the National Book Foundation’s mission to celebrate the best of American literature, expand its audience, and enhance the cultural value of good writing in America. This year’s winners will be announced on November 20.
