Here Are The Finalists For The 2017 National Book Awards

It began with more than 1,500 books.

With all the works submitted by publishers, the judges for this year's National Book Awards have had their hands (and bookshelves) full the past few months. But that daunting number of contenders winnowed further Wednesday, as the National Book Foundation announced the finalists for its literary prize — just five works each in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people's literature.

You can find those shortlists below, paired with links to NPR's previous coverage for readers to get to know those nominees better.

For now, at least, there are two winners whose names we won't have to wait on: Annie Proulx, who has already won a National Book Award for The Shipping News, will be honored this year with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the NBF's version of a lifetime achievement award. And Dick Robinson, president and CEO of Scholastic, will be receiving the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

The rest of this year's winners will be announced on Nov. 15 in New York City.

Fiction

Elliot Ackerman: Dark at the Crossing

Lisa Ko: The Leavers

Min Jin Lee: Pachinko

Carmen Maria Machado: Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Nonfiction

Erica Armstrong Dunbar: Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge

Frances FitzGerald: The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

Masha Gessen: The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

David Grann: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Poetry

Frank Bidart: Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

Leslie Harrison: The Book of Endings

Layli Long Soldier: WHEREAS

Shane McCrae: In the Language of My Captor

Danez Smith: Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

Young People's Literature

Elana K. Arnold: What Girls Are Made Of

Robin Benway: Far from the Tree

Erika L. Sánchez: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Rita Williams-Garcia: Clayton Byrd Goes Underground

Ibi Zoboi: American Street