Thursday, June 03, 2021

THRITY KEYNOTE SPEAKER FOR CARNEGIE BOOK AWARDS

 


Former BJ reporter and author Thrity Umrigar will be the keynote speaker for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence awards June 24. Because of COVID it will be a virtual ceremony at the American Library Association’s virtual conference.

 

The fiction winner is James McBride, for Deacon King Kong, set in a Brooklyn neighborhood dealing with drug gangs,

and nonfiction winner is Rebecca Giggs for Fathoms: The World in the Whale, a save the whales exploration.

 

Carnegie Medal winners will each receive $5,000.

 

The American Library Association made the selections. The awards began in 2012.

The other 2021 fiction finalists included A Burning (Alfred A. Knopf) by Megha Majumdar, and Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown and Company) by Ayad Akhtar.

Nonfiction finalists also included Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press) by Claudia Rankine, and Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco) by Natasha Trethewey.

The non-fiction winner in 2020 was Adam Higginbotham for “Midnight in Chernobyl.” The fiction winner last year was Valerie Luiselli for “Lost Children Archive.”


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