Here are the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards
Three-time National Book Award finalist Edwidge Danticat and debut novelist Morgan Thomas are up for the fiction prize. Nonfiction books cover the prison system and music, and queer parenthood.
The National Book Foundation recently revealed the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards in five categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People's Literature. Winners will receive $10,000, a bronze medal, and a statue, while all finalists will get $1,000 and a bronze medal. The finalists are as follows:
FICTION: Hannah Lillith Assadi's Paradiso, Edwidge Danticat's Dèy, Julián Delgado Lopera's Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, Valeria Luiselli's Beginning Middle End, and Morgan Thomas's Mad Eden.
NONFICTION: Colin Asher's The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, Abdelrahman ElGendy's Huna, Camonghne Felix's Let the Poets Govern, Sara Nović's Mother Tongue, and Joseph Osmundson's Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.
POETRY: Victoria Chang's Tree of Knowledge, Carolina Ebeid's Hide, Brenda Hillman's Still House in the Desert, Fady Joudah's Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, and Susan Stewart's Bramble.
TRANSLATED LITERATURE: Karl Ove Knausgaard's The School of Night, Vicente Luis Mora's Centroeuropa, Intan Paramaditha's Night of a Thousand Hells, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's Pure Men, and Samar Yazbek's Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza.
YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE: Elana K. Arnold's Holloway, Tae Keller's When Tomorrow Burns, Keala Kendall's That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels's The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America, and Julian Randall's Shook.
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