LEWISTON – A Bates College lecturer who graduated from the elite Lewiston school almost two decades ago is among the 10 honorees for a National Book Award in fiction, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards.

“I was astonished, to be honest,” writer Jessica Anthony said Monday. The possibility her novel “The Most” could be among the chosen was “not even on my radar screen.”

She said she learned of the honor when she sat down on her couch in Portland to grade papers and checked Instagram to find a message from a friend congratulating her.

“I was startled and shocked, but thrilled,” Anthony said.

Anthony’s short novel begins with a simple line that hints at both past and future: “Kathleen Beckett awoke feeling poorly.”

From there, it delivers what the National Book Foundation said is “an intimate portrait of marriage in the late 1950s — and the secrets, expectations, and lost loves that tells the story of one seemingly unremarkable couple and a larger cultural moment.”

Reviewers have been nearly uniform in praising the slim volume published in July.

Anthony, who teaches two courses at Bates, including a first-year seminar in the Art of the Short Story, has published four well-received novels in the past 15 years, including 2020’s “Enter the Aardvark,” a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction.

She said she loves teaching.

“Every time you go into the classroom, you remember what it’s like to learn to write,” Anthony said, a “feeling of discovery that I experienced when I was an undergraduate.”

“It’s a reinvigorating thing to do as a writer to be reminded,” she said.

Anthony, who grew up in upstate New York, came to Bates College in the early 1990s with a love of reading and an affection for Maine, where her family summered in Tenants Harbor.

“I remember looking at the course offerings at Bates for the first time and seeing a creative writing workshop” for poetry, she said.

“And I remember asking myself: you can do that for credit? You know you can actually write poems and they will give you college credit for writing poems? It just sort of startled me into the possibility of actually writing poems and stories.”

For the first couple of years in Lewiston, Anthony said, she had no sense of herself as a writer. But that changed when she met poet Robert Farnsworth at Bates, she said.

Anthony said, “That was hugely impactful for me” because he was “a real writer.”

Like flicking a switch, she said, she realized “the fact that I love to read actually means something.”

By her senior year in 1996, she knocked out a piece of fiction for her thesis “that hopefully will remain hidden in a dark cave somewhere.”

After Bates, she knocked around the world working jobs from Prague to San Francisco, taking time before heading to graduate school to begin a life as a writer.

She said she moved back to Maine after graduate school because her husband is a music producer working out of a Portland studio.

“So we just settled in the area,” Anthony said, and she began teaching at the University of Southern Maine and working on her writing.

“It’s been a love affair with Maine, she said. “Maine is part of my identity.”

One day in 2010, she ran into Farnsworth and he asked her what she was doing.

When she told him that McSweeney’s had just published her first novel, he suggested she come back and teach at Bates — and she’s been doing it ever since.

Anthony said Bates does a good job of teaching writing, required for all students, and has “graduated so many extraordinary writers” over the years, including Elizabeth Strout, class of 1977, whose “Olive Kitteridge” won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, the year Anthony’s first book hit the presses.

Anthony said, though, not every writer is publishing.

Some are doing it for a writing group or maybe just for themselves, she said, but “they are writers.”

“It’s a part of who they are — and that to me is the most exciting and interesting piece because writing gives you something in your life. You always have an identity,” Anthony said.

That’s part of why she is so delighted to spend two or three days a week teaching at Bates.

It’s a way, she said, of going back “to a place of origin and newness and beginning.”

Anthony called it an honor to read someone’s early work.

“I really believe that,” she said. “It’s the scary thing to do to share your early stories with another reader,” which is probably even more true when the reader is among the most acclaimed novelists in the country.

Anthony is working on her next novel, whose subject she doesn’t want to disclose except to mention that she got to spend a month as writer at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home on the Potomac River.

Anthony will learn Oct. 1 whether her novel “The Most,” which isn’t yet on the shelves of the bookstore at Bates, makes the shortlist of finalists for the award. The foundation expects to announce the winners in all of its book categories on Nov. 20.

Another writer with Maine ties is among those longlisted for a National Book Award in nonfiction.

Ernest Scheyder, a senior correspondent for Reuters who graduated from the University of Maine and worked for the Bangor Daily News early in his career, wrote “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power our Lives,” one of 10 nonfiction books contending for the top prize.