Literary awards: September 10, 2024

Literary Hub has news of two book prize shortlists from overseas.

The American Library in Paris Award goes to works originally published in English that realize "new and intellectually significant ideas about France, the French people, or encounters with French culture."

Here are the finalists; the winner will be announced and granted a $5,000 prize on November 7.

• The Revolutionary Temper: Paris 1748–1789 by Robert Darnton

• House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker

• This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

• The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz

• Monet: The Restless Vision by Jackie Wullschläger

The British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding goes to "works of non-fiction that have made an outstanding contribution to the public understanding of world cultures and their interactions."

Here are the finalists; the winner will be announced and granted a £25,000 prize (about $32,700) on October 22.

• Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh

• The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell

• The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 by Marcy Norton

• Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues by Ross Perlin

• Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo