This week, The New Yorker will be announcing the longlists for the 2020 National Book Awards. Check back this afternoon for the list for Translated Literature.
Kingston James, the protagonist of Kacen Callender’s novel “King and the Dragonflies,” is convinced that his deceased older brother Khalid has transformed into a dragonfly, and spends every afternoon searching for him by the bayou in his Louisiana home town. What haunts King is not just the loss of his brother but a sense that Khalid died without knowing who King really was. King is gay, and terrified to share the truth with his grieving parents. The book follows him as he tries to reconcile the memory of his brother with a new understanding of himself.
Callender’s book is one of several on the longlist for this year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature that depict children making sense of death and the afterlife. Aiden Thomas’s début, “Cemetery Boys,” follows a transgender boy who summons a spirit in order to prove himself as a brujo; “The Way Back,” by Gavriel Savit, is about two Jewish teens living in a shtetl who are visited by messengers of Death; “Trowbridge Road,” by Marcella Pixley, narrates the summer of 1983 from the perspective of a girl whose father has just died of AIDS. All of the authors on this year’s longlist are first-time nominees.
The full list is below.
Kacen Callender, “King and the Dragonflies”
Scholastic Press / Scholastic Inc.
Traci Chee, “We Are Not Free”
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Evette Dionne, “Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box”
Viking Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Eric Gansworth, “Apple (Skin to the Core)”
Levine Querido
Candice Iloh, “Every Body Looking”
Dutton Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed, “When Stars Are Scattered”
Dial Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Marcella Pixley, “Trowbridge Road”
Candlewick Press
John Rocco, “How We Got to the Moon: The People, Technology, and Daring Feats of Science Behind Humanity’s Greatest Adventure”
Crown Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Gavriel Savit, “The Way Back”
Knopf Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Aiden Thomas, “Cemetery Boys”
Swoon Reads / Macmillan Publishers
The judges for the category this year are Randy Ribay, whose novel “Patron Saints of Nothing” was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award; Neal Shusterman, the author of more than thirty novels, including “Challenger Deep,” which won the 2015 National Book Award; Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education; Colleen AF Venable, whose graphic novel “Kiss Number 8” was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award; and the bookseller and writer Joan Trygg.
