Librarians honor books by Luiselli and Higginbotham

NEW YORK (AP) — Valeria Luiselli’s novel “Lost Children Archive” and Adam Higginbotham’s nonfiction “Midnight in Chernobyl” have been awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal, a $5,000 prize presented by the American Library Association.

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The awards for fiction and nonfiction were announced Sunday and honor two of last year’s most acclaimed books. “Lost Children Archive,” a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize, blends fiction and documentation as it probes the fates of refugee children. “Midnight in Chernobyl” recounts the 1986 nuclear power disaster and the Soviet Union government’s desperate efforts to conceal it.

“We hope that librarians will find the two Carnegie winners to be powerful and fruitful titles to recommend and discuss,” prize committee chair Donna Seaman said in a statement. The awards were announced during the library association’s annual mid-winter meeting, held this year in Philadelphia.

Previous Carnegie medal winners include Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy,” adapted into a feature film that is now in theaters.

Both Luiselli and Higginbotham are lifelong fans of libraries. In a recent email to The Associated Press, Luiselli called herself a “radical nerd” and praised the Carnegie prize as “the ultimate radical nerd award.” A native of Mexico City, she lived everywhere from Wisconsin to Costa Rica growing up and remembers attending an American elementary school in South Korea, where she would sneak into the high school library to read horror stories.

Now a resident of New York City, the 36-year-old Luiselli says she has "spent more time in libraries — between the stacks, in silent reading rooms, in the rare books & manuscript sections, and hovering behind the lenses of microfilm readers — than is…