The 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were announced at the RUSA Book and Media Awards event, sponsored by NoveList, during the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia on Sunday, January 26. Carnegie Medal winners each receive $5,000

Fiction

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.

Nonfiction

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.