Vietnam, slavery and racism tackled on NBA nonfiction shortlist

The Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has made the shortlist for the National Book Award for nonfiction, for his investigation into how the Vietnam war is remembered around the world.

Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer earlier this year for his debut novel The Sympathizer, about a half-Vietnamese, half-French communist spy, was shortlisted for the $10,000 (£7,800) prize for his look at the legacy of the Vietnam war, Nothing Ever Dies. More than 500 nonfiction books were submitted for the award, which is for writing by US citizens and which is judged by a panel of experts.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild was picked alongside Nguyen for Strangers in Their Own Land, an account of her journey to the Louisiana bayou, a stronghold of America’s conservative right. Ibram X Kendi also made the five-strong shortlist for Stamped from the Beginning, a chronicle of anti-black racist ideas in the US through history, and Andrés Reséndez for The Other Slavery, an account of the tens of thousands of Native Americans who were kidnapped and enslaved after European colonisers arrived in the New World. The nonfiction lineup is completed with Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, about the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York in 1971.

The National Book Award for fiction, won in the past by names from William Faulkner to Philip Roth, saw Jacqueline Woodson, winner of an NBA for young people’s literature two years ago, picked for her first adult novel in 20 years, Another Brooklyn. About a woman from Tennessee who has moved back to Brooklyn with her grieving family, it was chosen by judges alongside Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which follows the escape of fugitive slave Cora and was selected by Oprah for her latest book club, and also named on Obama’s summer reading list; Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, showing both sides of a terrorist attack in Delhi; and Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, in which a retired army captain has to deliver a kidnapped young orphan to her relatives after the US civil war.

With 387 titles submitted, the shortlist for fiction is completed with Chris Bachelder’s look at a group of men confronting middle age, marriage and fatherhood, The Throwback Special.

Former US poet laureate Rita Dove is shortlisted for the poetry National Book Award for her Collected Poems 1974–2004, alongside collections from Daniel Borzutzky, Peter Gizzi, Jay Hopler and Solmaz Sharif. Sharif, an Iranian-American, was chosen for her debut collection Look, which incorporates phrases from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to look at the human costs of war.

In the poem Personal Effects, Sharif writes:

Daily I sit
with the language
they’ve made
of our language
to NEUTRALIZE
the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMs
like you.
You are what is referred to as
a ‘CASUALTY’

US congressman and civil rights pioneer John Lewis, meanwhile, makes the shortlist for the NBA for young people’s literature for the third instalment in his graphic novel memoir March, for which he won the Eisner award this year. Lewis was picked alongside novels by the writers Kate DiCamillo, Grace Lin, Jason Reynolds and Nicola Yoon. The winners of all four prizes will be announced on 16 November.