Home > Culture > Books

Han Kang, Megha Majumdar and Yiyun Li are among finalists for Andrew Carnegie Medals

Published: 19 Nov. 2025, 09:32

Author Han Kang speaks to the media during a news conference in Seoul on May 24, 2016. [AP/YONHAP]

Nobel laureate Han Kang's "We Do Not Part" (2021), Megha Majumdar's "A Guardian and a Thief" and Yiyun Li's "Things in Nature Merely Grow" are among the finalists for Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction presented by the American Library Association.

"A Guardian and a Thief," already an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and a nominee for the National Book Award and Kirkus Prize, is among three Carnegie fiction finalists and the only one written originally in English. Kang's novel was translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris. Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica's “The Unworthy” was translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses.

Li's tragic memoir about the suicides of her two sons, also a National Book Award nominee, is a nonfiction finalist for the Carnegie Medal, along with Brian Goldstone's “There Is No Place for Us” and Melikah Abdelmoumen's joint biography of James Baldwin and William Styron, “Baldwin, Styron and Me,” translated from French by Catherine Khordoc.

Winners, to be announced Jan. 27, each receive $5,000. The awards were established in 2012 with help from a grant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Previous winners include Jennifer Egan, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Doris Kearns Goodwin.

AP