Kirkus announces finalists for its first book prizes, each $50,000

Kirkus Reviews, the influential book review journal, on Tuesday announced the nominees for the first-ever Kirkus Prizes in fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature. The young readers’ literature category is divided into three subcategories -- picture books, middle grade and young adult -- but only one winner among those subcategories will be named.

The winner in each category, to be announced in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 23, will receive $50,000. This makes the prize one of the most lucrative in literature; the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize each come with a $10,000 award.

Familiar names among the Kirkus Prize finalists include novelists Siri Hustvedt and Sarah Waters, French economist Thomas Piketty, and cartoonist and memoirist Roz Chast.

To be eligible for the Kirkus Prize, books must receive a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, an honor that’s awarded fairly seldom.

The short lists for the prizes are below.

Fiction:
Siri Hustvedt, “The Blazing World” (Simon & Schuster)
Lily King, “Euphoria” (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Dinaw Mengestu, “All Our Names” (Knopf)
Brian Morton, “Florence Gordon” (Houghton Mifflin)
Bill Roorbach, “The Remedy for Love” (Algonquin Books)
Sarah Waters, “The Paying Guests” (Riverhead)

Nonfiction:
Roz Chast, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” (Bloomsbury)
Leo Damrosch, “Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World” (Yale University Press)
Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” (Holt)
Armand Marie Leroi, “The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science” (Viking)
Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Harvard University Press)
Bryan Stevenson, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” (Spiegel & Grau)

Young readers’ literature:
Picture books:
Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet, “The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus” (Eerdmans)
Kate Samworth, “Aviary Wonders Inc.: Spring Catalog and Instruction Manual” (Clarion)
Middle grade:
Cece Bell, “El Deafo” (Amulet/Abrams)
Jack Gantos, “The Key That Swallowed Joey Pigza” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Young adult:
E. K. Johnston, “The Story of Owen, Dragon Slayer of Trondheim” (Carolrhoda Lab)
Don Mitchell, “The Freedom Summer Murders” (Scholastic)