The longlist for the National Book Award for nonfiction has been announced, with David Quammen, Imani Perry, and Ingrid Rojas Contreras among the authors in contention for the annual literary prize.
Quammen made the longlist for his history of Covid-19, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus. Quammen was previously nominated for the prize in 2018 for The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.
Perry was nominated for her memoir and travel narrative South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, while Rojas Contreras was nominated for her family memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds.
Meghan O’Rourke made the longlist for The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, which draws on her own experience with Lyme disease. Authors Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa were nominated for His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice, as was Natalie Hodges for Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time.
Other books making the longlist were Anna Badkhen’s Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays, John A. Farrell’s Ted Kennedy: A Life, Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, and Kathryn Schulz’s Lost & Found: A Memoir.
The shortlists for the awards will be revealed on Oct. 4, with the winners announced at a ceremony in New York on Nov. 16.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
