These Oregon authors have been named National Book Awards finalists

PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Two Oregon authors could bring National Book Awards home this year.

The National Book Foundation unveiled 25 finalists for the annual awards program earlier this week. Oregon writers Omar El Akkad and Karen Russell are both vying for trophies in different categories.

Released in February, El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” is up for the nonfiction award. The book “centers his attention on American and European complicity in the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people, arguing that mass apathy towards immense suffering is leading to innumerable fractures across Western societies,” according to NBF.

El Akkad previously earned praise for his fiction novels “American War” and “What Strange Paradise,” but his newly-nominated book is his debut nonfiction work.

He is up against Julia Ioffe’s “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy,” Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Claudia Rowe’s “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care” and Jordan Thomas’ “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.”

Russell, who was already recognized by NBF as one of their 5 Under 35 honorees in 2009, was named a finalist in the fiction category for “The Antidote.” The novel released in March “set in a fictional Dust Bowl-era Nebraska town on the brink of collapse — bracing against the forces of the Great Depression and the community’s violent histories with Indigenous people and the land.”

Rabih Alameddine’s “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother),” Megha Majumdar’s “A Guardian and a Thief,” Ethan Rutherford’s “North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther” and Bryan Washington’s “Palaver” are also up for the award.

Both Russell and El Akkad will present pieces of their nominated works at National Book Awards’ Finalist Reading scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 18 at New York University’s Skirball Center. Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner, also a writer and Oregon native known for her book “Crying in H Mart” will host the event.

The awards ceremony is slated for Wednesday, Nov. 19 at New York City’s Cipriani Wall Street.