She may have lost out on the Booker prize on Tuesday to Marlon James, but Hanya Yanagihara has made the list of finalists for the National Book Award. Tanagihara’s book A Little Life – which has divided critics – heads up a five-strong list of finalists for fiction. The other nominated books are Refused by Karen E Bender, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff and Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson.

Meanwhile Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is a finalist for the nonfiction prize along with Sally Mann’s Hold Still, Ordinary Light by Tracy K Smith, If Oceans Were Ink by Carla Power and The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery.

Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Coates’s book has put its author at the centre of the debate about race and police brutality in America and become a bestseller. Coates was also recently named a beneficiary of a $625,000 MacArthur fellow “genius grant”. None of the writers on either the fiction or nonfiction shortlist have been shortlisted for the NBA before.

The poetry shortlist includes Terrance Hayes, who won the NBA award in 2010, and four first-timers; Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Robin Coste Lewis and Patrick Phillips. The young people’s literature finalists are Steve Sheinkin, Ali Benjamin, Laura Ruby, Neal Shusterman and cartoonist Noelle Stevenson.