This week, the National Book Foundation announced the longlists for the 2025 National Book Awards, and two Seattleites are included.
Journalist Claudia Rowe, a former Seattle Times reporter who now sits on the paper’s editorial board, was longlisted in the nonfiction category for her book “Wards of the State.” In a May interview with Rowe in The Seattle Times, writer Rebekah Denn called the book “an immersive, devastating look at foster children’s lives and a systemic pipeline to homelessness and prison.”
“I personally wanted to know, what does it feel like to be a kid on the street? What is that experience like? I wanted the reader to see through their eyes,” Rowe said in the May interview. “Beyond that, I did want to give voice to people who almost never have that experience of being heard.”
Rowe said via email this week of being named to the longlist: “I am beyond honored by this recognition for ‘Wards of the State.’ It’s a powerful statement about the impact and reverberations of growing up in foster care, a sprawling yet invisible system that actually affects us all.”
Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s translation of “We Computers: A Ghazal Novel” by Hamid Ismailov was longlisted in the translated literature category. Fairweather-Vega specializes in prose and poetry from Central Asia.
“I was thrilled to learn that my translation of Hamid Ismailov’s novel ‘We Computers’ was included on the National Book Awards longlist for translated literature,” Fairweather-Vega said in an email. “Ismailov is a wonderful, wise, worldly author who deserves to be better known, and ‘We Computers’ is one of his best books.”
Fairweather-Vega described the book as an “Uzbek novel about a modern-day French poet who discovers ancient Persian poetry, and tries programming a computer to read and analyze it.”
She said she had to translate not just the plot, but also all the poetry. “It’s a multilingual, postmodern novel, so translating it was like running a triathlon, back to back trials of strength and endurance.”
The National Book Awards were established in 1950 and feature the categories of young people’s literature, translated literature, poetry, nonfiction and fiction, and two lifetime achievement awards. Finalists will be announced on Oct. 7, and the 76th ceremony will take place on Nov. 19 at 5 p.m. PST. Register to watch at nationalbook.org/awards2025.
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