Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer about race, among nominees for Kirkus book prize for ‘World and Me’

NEW YORK, N.Y. – The accolades are piling up for one of the country’s top writers about race.

Trade publication Kirkus Reviews announced Wednesday that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” is a finalist for the $50,000 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.

Coates’ bestselling work on racism and police violence is framed as a letter to his teenage son. It already is a National Book Award nominee.

Coates earlier this week was among 24 recipients of MacArthur genius grants, worth $625,000.

Kirkus released a list of 18 finalists, six each for nonfiction, fiction and young people’s literature. Nominated works also include the novels “Fates and Furies” by Lauren Groff, “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara and Lauren Child’s picture book “The New Small Person.” Other finalists in fiction were Susan Barker’s “The Incarnations,” the late Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” Valeria Luiselli’s “The Story of My Teeth” and Jim Shepard’s “The Book of Aron.”

Besides Coates, nonfiction nominees were Helen Macdonald for the bestselling “H Is for Hawk,” Adam Tooze for “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931,” John Ferling for “Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War that Won It,” popular historian Simon Winchester for “Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers” and Andrea Wulf for “The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World.”

In young people’s literature, finalists besides Child were Jonah Winter for “Lillian’s Right to Vote: A Celebration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” Paul Munoz Ryan for “Echo,” Duncan Tonatiuh for “Funny Bones: Posada and His Day of the Dead Calaveras,” Martha Brockenbrough for “The Game of Love and Death” and Daniel Jose Older for “Shadowshaper.”

Winners will be announced Oct. 15. They will each receive $50,000.