The National Book Critics Circle of the US has issued a list consisting of five finalists for the 2017 awards for fiction, and it includes Arundhati Roy and Pakistan’s Mohsin Hamid.
Roy has been named for her popular book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness while Hamid made the cut for Exit West. Hamid’s latest novel deals with issues like emigration and refugee crisis.
Both Hamid and Roy’s books were published by Penguin Random House India last year and are only two authors from the subcontinent to figure in the list of five finalists declared by the National Book Critics Circle of the US for the 2017 awards for fiction.
The other three books to feature in the list were The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott, Improvement by Joan Silber, and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.
The National Book Critics Circle Awards began in 1975 and it is considered to be one of the most prestigious in American letters. So far the awards are bestowed by a jury of over 1,000 working critics and book review editors. The awards will be presented on March 15 at the New School in New York City.
While the finalists who have made it to the non-fiction category are: Jack E Davis’s The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea, Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen, Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe and A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford.
Awards are also be presented to authors in categories like autobiography, biography, poetry and criticism.