2013 National Book Award Finalists Announced

Nonfiction

• Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House
• Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, W.W. Norton & Company
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House

Poetry

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion, Alfred A. Knopf
• Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke, Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA
• Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture, Louisiana State University Press
• Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems, Graywolf Press

Young People's Literature

• Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster
• Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck, Atheneum Books for Young Readers/ Simon & Schuster
• Tom McNeal, Far Far Away, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House
• Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone, G.P. Putnam's Sons/Penguin Group (USA)
• Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints, First Second/Macmillan

For more information about the Finalists for the 2013 National Book Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award Winners, and details about the Awards ceremony, visit the National Book Foundation.

The National Book Award is one of the nation's most prestigious literary prizes and has a stellar record of identifying and rewarding quality writing. In 1950, William Carlos Williams was the first Winner in Poetry, the following year William Faulkner was honored in Fiction, and so on through the years.

Many previous Winners of a National Book Award are now firmly established in the canon of American literature, such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Adrienne Rich.