Awards season: Goldsmiths Prize nominees, Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant winners

Those looking for a brain cleanse after all the news of celebrity book deals are in luck.

There are no puff pieces to be found among the ranks of the grant recipients and literary prize shortlist that we’re about to share from the past few days.

First, the eight books that “foster original, ambitious projects that bring writing to the highest possible standard” and thus earned their authors a $40,000 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant:

• Biography: House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens, by Channing Gerard Joseph.

• Cultural reportage: The Compton Cowboys: A New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland, by Walter Thompson-Hernández.

• Graphic nonfiction: Seek You: Essays on American Loneliness, by Kristen Radtke.

• History: The Call of Empire, by Wil S. Hylton; The Mountain in the Burning Sky, by Damon Tabor; and Master Slave Husband Wife: An American Love Story, by Ilyon Woo.

• Investigative journalism/health: The Cancer Factory, by Jim Morris.

• Memoir: Concepción: A Family’s Journey on the Immigrant Wave That Changed the Face of America, by Albert Samaha.

The above books are forthcoming from their publishers, so you'll have to content yourself with the judges' commentary, but you won’t have to wait to read the works on the Goldsmiths Prize’s shortlist.

One of these six books will receive the honor — and £10,000 — on November 13:

• Slip of a Fish, by Amy Arnold.

• Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann (also in the running for the Booker Prize).

• The Porpoise, by Mark Haddon.

• The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy.

• Good Day?, by Vesna Main.

• We Are Made of Diamond Stuff, by Isabel Waidner.

Don’t expect an easy read, of course; the Goldsmith Prize celebrates “fiction at its most novel” — such as Ducks, Newburyport, whose thousand pages are mostly made of a single sentence.