The judges for the category this year are the poet and activist Heather Kathleen Moody Hall, proprietor of Green Feather Book Company; Tiya Miles, a history professor at Harvard whose book, “All That She Carried,” won the 2021 National Book Award; the journalist and filmmaker Raj Patel, author of “Stuffed and Starved”; Cristina Rivera Garza, a professor at the University of Houston whose 2024 book “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” won the Pulitzer Prize; and the New York Times reporter Eli Saslow, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and 2023.

Poetry

This year, The New Yorker published poems from six of the ten poetry collections that appear on this year’s longlist: “Piano Lesson,” by Richard Siken; “True Apothecary,” by Natalie Shapero; “Maybe in Another Life,” by Tiana Clark; “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern,” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi; “70,” by Patricia Smith; and an excerpt of “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans,” by Rickey Laurentiis. Nine of the nominees are being honored by the National Book Awards for the first time; Smith, long-listed this year for “The Intentions of Thunder,” was a finalist in 2008.

Gbenga Adesina, “Death Does Not End at the Sea”
University of Nebraska

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “The New Economy”
Copper Canyon

Cathy Linh Che, “Becoming Ghost”
Washington Square / Simon & Schuster

Tiana Clark, “Scorched Earth”
Washington Square / Simon & Schuster

Rickey Laurentiis, “Death of the First Idea”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Esther Lin, “Cold Thief Place”
Alice James Books

Natalie Shapero, “Stay Dead”
Copper Canyon

Richard Siken, “I Do Know Some Things”
Copper Canyon

Patricia Smith, “The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems”
Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, “Terror Counter”
Deep Vellum

The judges for the category this year are Kate Daniels, author of the recent poetry collection “In the Months of My Son’s Recovery”; Terrance Hayes, whose collection “Lighthead” won the 2010 National Book Award; H. Melt, author of “There Are Trans People Here”; Anis Mojgani, who recently served as Oregon’s tenth poet laureate; and Caridad Moro-Gronlier, author of “Tortillera.”

Translated Literature

In March, Alice Gregory reviewed Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection”—an Italian-language novel about the beautiful, aimless life of an expat millennial couple in Berlin, which reimagines Georges Perec’s début “Things: A Story of the Sixties” (1965) in the twenty-tens. “Perfection,” translated into English by Sophie Hughes, is one of ten titles on this year’s longlist. The books on the list originally appeared in nine languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Uzbek. Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers: A Ghazal Novel,” about a French poet who devises an A.I. program to replicate Persian poetry, is the first Uzbek translation to be honored by the National Book Awards.

Solvej Balle, “On the Calculation of Volume (Book III)”
Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
New Directions

Jazmina Barrera, “The Queen of Swords”
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, “We Are Green and Trembling”
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
New Directions

Anjet Daanje, “The Remembered Soldier”
Translated from the Dutch by David McKay
New Vessel

Saou Ichikawa, “Hunchback”
Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton
Hogarth / Penguin Random House

Hamid Ismailov, “We Computers: A Ghazal Novel”
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Yale

Han Kang, “We Do Not Part”
Translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
Hogarth / Penguin Random House

Mohamed Kheir, “Sleep Phase”
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Two Lines

Vincenzo Latronico, “Perfection”
Translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes
New York Review Books

Neige Sinno, “Sad Tiger”
Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer
Seven Stories

This week, The New Yorker announced the longlists for the 2023 National Book Awards. Earlier, we presented the lists for Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, and Nonfiction.

In “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s début novel, death matches between predominantly Black prisoners are broadcast live for viewers’ entertainment. The book is an indictment of the criminal-justice system, one of several titles on the longlist that center on violent attempts to impose hierarchies of race or belief. “A Council of Dolls,” by Mona Susan Power, details the cruelty of Indian boarding schools intended to “civilize” Native American children. “This Other Eden,” by Paul Harding, is inspired by the history of Malaga Island, a mixed-race community off the coast of Maine whose residents were forcibly evicted, and some institutionalized, in the early twentieth century. “The End of Drum-Time,” by Hanna Pylväinen, imagines a difficult encounter between the native Sámi residents of Scandinavia and a Lutheran minister intent on converting them. And Justin Torres’s “Blackouts” takes up the research of the queer sexologist Jan Gay, which was co-opted to produce a mid-century study that pathologized homosexuality.

The ten titles on the list were chosen from four hundred and ninety-six submissions by publishers. Three authors on the longlist, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Justin Torres, have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation. The full list is below.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “Chain-Gang All-Stars”
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House

Aaliyah Bilal, “Temple Folk”
Simon & Schuster

Eliot Duncan, “Ponyboy”
W. W. Norton & Company

Paul Harding, “This Other Eden”
W. W. Norton & Company

Tania James, “Loot”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Jayne Anne Phillips, “Night Watch”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Mona Susan Power, “A Council of Dolls”
Mariner Books / HarperCollins Publishers

Hanna Pylväinen, “The End of Drum-Time”
Henry Holt & Company / Macmillan Publishers

Justin Torres, “Blackouts”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

LaToya Watkins, “Holler, Child”
Tiny Reparations Books / Penguin Random House

The judges for the prize this year are Steph Cha, the author of “Your House Will Pay”; Calvin Crosby, the co-owner of The King’s English Bookshop; Silas House, whose novel “Lark Ascending” received the 2023 Southern Book Prize for Fiction; Mat Johnson, a professor of humanities at the University of Oregon and the author of “Invisible Things” and “Pym”; and Helena María Viramontes, a professor of English at Cornell University and the author of “Under the Feet of Jesus” and “Their Dogs Came with Them.” ♦