Finalists announced for brand new literary award

Thu, 05/17/2012 - 11:17am by sernabad

The American Library Association and the Carnegie Corporation of New York have collaborated to establish a brand new literary award for authors of books for adults. The finalists for the first Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence, all published in 2011, were announced today.

This new award is unique for two reasons: It's the first award for adults sponsored by the American Library Association, which has a long prestigious list of youth literature prizes. And, unlike most literary awards which are judged by writers and critics, the Carnegie judges are library professionals.

The finalists for this year are:

Robert K. Massie for Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, Empress of Russia. Pulitzer Prize winner Massie's massive tome was named on the Best Books Lists of more than a dozen major publications.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick. Gleick, author of two previous popular science studies, Chaos: Making a New Science (1992( and Genius: the Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992), studies the transformative relationship between information and human consciousness.

Manning Marable was tapped for Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, in which he reveals new information and re-examines conventional wisdom assumptions about this late civil rights figure.

In the fiction category, Russell Banks was selected for Lost Memory of Skin, is the disturbing story of the Kid, a 22-year-old vet convicted of being a sex offender for an online chat with an underage girl. Forced by law to live under a Florida causeway with other sex offenders, the Kid catches the attention of a community college professor who alleges to study/rehab the Kid. However, this is a Russell Banks novel, so get ready to be deeply challenged.

In the The Forgotten Waltz, Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize winner, takes a done-to-death theme -- two people not married to each other have a torrid affair -- and re-invents it with gorgeous language that moves back and forth in time with a stunning Ireland backdrop

Rounding out the fiction finalists is Karen Russell's Swamplandia!. Also set in Florida, a tween female gator wrestler, Ava Bigtree, struggles to keep her family together as they face the loss of the alligator theme park they own. A fantastical, magical first novel.

Winners will be announced at the annual American Library Association conference on June 24 in Anaheim, CA.