Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence: Longlist 2020

A total of 49 books (24 fiction, 25 nonfiction) have been selected for the longlist for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction

The fiction category’s closest approach to genre comes in the magical realism of Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew, and perhaps Téa Obreht’s Inland, which reviews suggest features a ghost and an imaginary creature at points in the story.

The nonfiction category notably includes sff writer Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House: A Memoir about her abusive relationship with a former partner who is referred throughout as “the woman from the Dream House.”

Other longlisted nonfiction works of potential interest to Filers are Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, and Brian Jay Jones’ Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination.

Nor should one overlook Maria Popova’s Figuring, by the creator behind the website Brain Pickings, whose author Booklist applauds for bringing “her hunger for facts and zeal for biography to this exhilarating and omnivorous inquiry into the lives of geniuses who ‘bridged the scientific and poetic.’”

Six finalists will be announced on November 4, and two medal winners will be announced at the Reference and User Services Association’s Book and Media Awards event at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits in Philadelphia on Sunday, January 26. The Carnegie Medal winners will each receive $5,000.

Fiction

Nonfiction

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