Each year, the editors of The Believer give out awards to the works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry they found to be the best written and most underappreciated. Below are the longlists of nominees for each category. The short lists and winners will be announced in our April/May issue, and the winners will join us for the 2020 Believer Festival in Las Vegas.
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Fiction
- Animalia, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions / Grove Press)
- A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions)
- The Organs of Sense, Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Farrar Straus and Giroux)
- The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter (Two Dollar Radio)
- Hot Comb, Ebony Flowers (Drawn & Quarterly)
- Infinite Detail, Tim Maughan (MCD Books)
- Star, Yukio Mishima, translated by Sam Bett (New Directions)
- The Scent of Buenos Aires, Hebe Uhart, translated by Maureen Shaughnessy (Archipelago Books)
- Permission, Saskia Vogel (Coach House Books)
- The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter, Rosmarie Waldrop (Dorothy)
Poetry
- Dispatch, Cameron Awkward-Rich (Persea Books)
- Huge Cloudy, Bill Carty (Octopus Books)
- Soft Science, Franny Choi (Alice James Books)
- The Problem of the Many, Timothy Donnelly (Wave Books)
- Safe Houses I Have Known, Steve Healey (Coffee House Press)
- Valuing, Christopher Kondrich (University of Georgia Press)
- Soft Targets, Deborah Landau (Copper Canyon Press)
- Hull, Xandria Phillips (Nightboat Books)
- States of the Body Produced by Love, Nisha Ramayya (Ignota Books)
- The Octopus Museum, Brenda Shaughnessy (Knopf)
- Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017, Eleanor Wilner (Princeton University)
- The Experiment of the Tropics, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil (Gaudy Boy)
Nonfiction
- 97,196 Words, Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert (Farrar Straus and Giroux)
- The Crying Book, Heather Christle (Catapult Books)
- Experiments in Joy, Gabrielle Civil (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
- Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being, Amy Fung (Book*hug Press / Artspeak)
- The House of the Pain of Others, Julián Herbert, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)
- Grass, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, translated by Janet Hong (Drawn & Quarterly)
- Females, Andrea Long Chu (Verso Books)
- Socialist Realism, Trisha Low (Coffee House Press)
- The White Paper, Satoshi Nakamoto, translated by Jaya Klara Brekke (Ignota Books)
- Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (University of Texas Press)
- Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame, Erin Williams (Abrams Books)
