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Dear Festival Friends, Happy fall, or, as we like to say, happy book awards season. It starts with the announcement of the Booker Prize and National Book Awards long lists, when we congratulate ourselves on the books we’ve read and fill our shopping carts and library bags with those we haven’t. Then come the lists of finalists: six novels for the Booker Prize, and twenty-five works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for the National Book Awards. This year’s Booker Prize will be announced on November 12, followed by the National Book Awards on November 20. We’ll be donning slippers and cardigans for the live-streams, cheering extra loud for three of our 2025 Festival authors, who are among the 2024 finalists. The brilliant Percival Everett has been nominated for both awards. (He’s also a former Pulitzer Prize finalist.) In James, he reimagines Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s traveling companion Jim, giving the enslaved runaway agency and an intellect that transcends Mark Twain’s stereotype. The cultural polymath Miranda July received a National Book Award nomination for her novel All Fours, which tells the story of a middle-aged artist who blows up her life as an act of protest against menopause, stifling domesticity, and the long shadow of mortality. In the National Book Award’s nonfiction category, Santa Fe’s very own Deborah Jackson Taffa is nominated for her memoir, Whiskey Tender, which chronicles her childhood as a mixed-tribe Native American and her family’s struggle to assimilate. We can’t wait to welcome all three of these literary MVPs at the Festival, May 16-18. Tickets go on sale early in the new year, so watch this space for updates. In the meantime, we encourage you to order your books from our official Festival bookstore, Garcia Street Books.
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