Each year, the editors of The Believer give out awards to the works of fiction and poetry they found to be the best written and most underappreciated. This year, for the first time, they have added a third award in the category of nonfiction. 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 be honored at a ceremony on the opening night of the 2019 Believer Festival in Las Vegas on April 25.
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Fiction
- Belly Up by Rita Bullwinkel (A Strange Object)
- Brother by David Chariandy (Bloomsbury Publishing)
- Some Trick by Helen DeWitt (New Directions)
- Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard (New Directions)
- Riddance; Or: The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children by Shelley Jackson (Black Balloon Books)
- Hag by Kathleen Kaufman (Turner Publishing Company)
- A Short Film about Disappointment by Joshua Mattson (Penguin Press)
- Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Atlantic)
- Your Black Friend and Other Strangers by Ben Passmore (Silver Sprocket)
- The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette (Soft Skull Press)
- Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama, translated by Louise Heal Kawai (MCD)
Poetry
- Human Hours by Catherine Barnett (Graywolf Press)
- Threat Come Close by Aaron Coleman (Four Way Books)
- You Darling Thing by Monica Ferrell (Four Way Books)
- National Park by Emily Sieu Liebowitz (Gramma)
- Rest by Margaree Little (Four Way Books)
- Baby, I Don’t Care by Chelsey Minnis (Wave Books)
- The Cataracts by Raymond McDaniel (Coffee House Press)
- Good Morning America I Am Hungry and on Fire by Jamie Mortara (YesYes Books)
- Orlando by Sandra Simonds (Wave Books)
- Spectra by Ashley Toliver (Coffee House Press)
Nonfiction
- This Little Art by Kate Briggs (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
- Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction by Brian Dillon (New York Review Books)
- Idiophone by Amy Fusselman (Coffee House Press)
- Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump by Asad Haider (Verso)
- Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV by Lucas Mann (Vintage Books)
- The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail (New Directions)
- I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf)
- Interior States by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Anchor)
- Chalk: The Art and the Erasure of Cy Twombly by Joshua Rivkin (Melville House Books)
- Fear Icons by Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel (Mad Creek Books)
- Not to Read by Alejandro Zambra (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
