October 12, 2011—Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker has been selected as a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. The winner will be announced at the 62^nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 16. Each winner receives $10,000 plus a bronze statue; each Finalist receives a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award. Actor, writer, and musician John Lithgow will host this year’s ceremony and dinner.

Other finalists in the nonfiction category include Mary Gabriel (Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution), Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern), Manning Marable (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention), and Lauren Redniss (Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout). This year’s judges were Yunte Huang, Jille Lepore, Barbara Savage, and Alice Kaplan, who was the panel chair.

This has been a big week for Graywolf, with the National Book Award announcement coming on the heels of last Thursday’s news that Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Graywolf published The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly, in 2001. The Convert is the third National Book Award finalist in Graywolf’s history, and the first in the nonfiction category. In 2008, The End by Salvatore Scibona was a finalist for fiction, and in 1998, From the Devotions by Carl Phillips was a finalist for poetry.

Deborah Baker is the author of In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, as well as A Blue Hand: The Beats in India. She divides her time between Calcutta, Goa, and Brooklyn.

The National Book Awards recognizes the best of American literature, raising the cultural appreciation of great writing in the country while advancing the careers of both established and emerging writers like Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, and Lily Tuck. Since 1996, independent panels of five writers have chosen the National Book Award Winners in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature.