2020 Shortlist
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction 2020 Finalists
Six finalists, three fiction and three nonfiction, were selected for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.
The two medal winners will be announced on January 26, 2019, at the Reference and User Services Association’s Book and Media Awards event at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits in Philadelphia. Carnegie Medal winners will each receive $5,000. All the finalists will be honored during a celebratory event, sponsored by NoveList, at ALA’s 2020 Annual Conference in Chicago.
Fiction
Myla Goldberg
Feast Your Eyes
Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
In this mesmerizing, brilliantly structured, and deeply insightful novel about a radical photographer and single mother and how her controversial images affect her daughter, Myla Goldberg brings into provocative focus the need to make art, the obstacles confronting women artists, and the transcendence of love.
Valeria Luiselli
Lost Children Archive
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Intense and timely, Valeria Luiselli’s novel tracks husband-and-wife audio documentarians as they travel cross-country with their two children and deep into the painful history of the Apache people and the present immigration crisis on the Southwest border, while freshly exploring themes of conquest and remembrance, and powerfully conveying the beauty of the haunted landscape.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Water Dancer
One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel is a profoundly imagined and psychologically and socially perceptive drama about the atrocities of slavery sieved through the experiences and convictions of young Hiram Walker, who, as the son of an enslaved woman and the owner of a prominent Virginia estate, possesses a strange and liberating power.
Nonfiction
Maria Popova
Figuring
Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC
Maria Popova brings her zest for facts and passion for biography to this exhilarating and omnivorous inquiry into the lives of geniuses who “bridged the scientific and poetic,” spinning a fine web connecting such barrier-breakers as Margaret Fuller, Ada Lovelace, Frederick Douglass, and Rachel Carson.
David Treuer
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
David Treuer presents a richly dimensional “counternarrative” to the long-standing depiction of defeated, hopeless Native Americans, documenting, instead, the many ways each assault against Indigenous lives and cultures gave rise to a strong Native resolve not only to survive, but to emerge revitalized.
Adam Higginbotham
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Simon & Schuster
Adam Higginbotham has created a thoroughly researched, fast-paced, engrossing, and revelatory account of what led up to and what followed the explosion of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant on April 26, 1986, focusing on the people involved as they faced shocking circumstances that are having complex and significant global consequences.
The previous six finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction & Nonfiction:
2019 Shortlist
