Hiaasen, Laurie Halse Anderson on longlist for National Book Awards in young people’s category

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Carl Hiaasen, Laurie Halse Anderson and Jacqueline Woodson are among the 10 authors on the National Book Awards’ longlist for young people’s literature.

The National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, announced Monday that Hiaasen was nominated for “Skink-No Surrender” and Anderson for “The Impossible Knife of Memory.” Woodson was cited for “Brown Girl Dreaming.” Other nominees include Kate Milford’s “Greenglass House,” Deborah Wiles’ “Revolution: The Sixties Trilogy, Book Two” and Gail Giles’ “Girls Like Us.” Also on the list were John Corey Whaley’s “Noggin,” Andrew Smith’s “100 Sideways Miles,” Steve Sheinkin’s “The Port Chicago 50” and “Eliot Schrefer’s “Threatened.”

Most of the nominees are well known among young readers. Anderson and Woodson are both winners of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement, an honour administered by the American Library Association, and Sheinkin, Schrefer and Wiles are among those who have been National Book Award finalists

The foundation initiated longlists for the awards last year in an attempt to generate the kind of attention given to Britain’s Man Booker Prize. The longlists for poetry, nonfiction and fiction will be announced over the following three days.

The final five in each category will be revealed Oct. 15, with the winners to be announced at a Nov. 19 ceremony in Manhattan.