The 2026 National Book Award Finalists
By Ashly Moore Sheldon • October 06, 2026
The National Book Awards were established in 1950 to celebrate the best writing in the United States. Since 1989, the Awards have been overseen by the National Book Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to celebrate the best literature published in the United States, connect books with readers of all ages, and champion the literary arts as a vital part of our culture.
Although other categories have been recognized in the past, the Awards currently honors the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature published each year.
A panel of judges selects a Longlist of ten titles per category, which is then narrowed to five Finalists. Today, this year's Finalists were announced, and we're excited to share them with you.
Fiction
Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi
Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948's Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he's ever known. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward—always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure.
"Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?" After getting caught in a random act of violence, these are a few of the questions haunting Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami. As she processes her trauma, Magnolia must consider high-stakes life choices.
Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera
Cloistered in a dreary Bogotá apartment, Ignacio’s light has dimmed, leaving his teenage daughter, Valentina, to raise herself in the wake of her mother Alma’s death. From Ignacio’s dark past emerges the luminous Mamadora Eléctrica, the wise travesti who first introduced Ignacio to the city's queer scene.
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli
This story begins when a mother and her prepubescent daughter take off on a trip to Sicily. As the mother, whose marriage has collapsed, works on reconstructing their life as a duo, the daughter begins to ask difficult questions. This is a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. To Ro, newly diagnosed with autism and working as a trans healthcare worker, this carefully built life is a kind of paradise. But when their peace is suddenly imperiled, Ro must become the real-life hero the situation demands.
Nonfiction
Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music by Colin Asher
In American popular music, we often glorify rebellious artists and "outlaws." But this urgent account tells a deeper story about the criminal justice system's impact on our musicians, explored through compelling portraits of five artists whose careers span the twentieth century.
Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming by Abdelrahman ElGendy
In 2013, ElGendy was a seventeen-year-old student activist in Cairo. His father, fearing for his son's safety, accompanied him to a demonstration and the two were swept up in a brutal police crackdown. Spending the next six years as a political prisoner, ElGendy turned to the only refuge left to him: the page.
Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghne Felix
Throughout her career as a political strategist and speechwriter, the author, and acclaimed poet, has maintained her unwavering belief in language's foundational revolutionary potential. Part-memoir, part-manifesto, this account interprets Black radical literary traditions and reimagines freedom through refusal.
Novic's early years were steeped in music, Bible study, and a strong desire to fit in. But when she failed her school's hearing test, her worldview was thrown into chaos. This emotionally rich memoir retraces her path out of the hearing world and into the deaf community.
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Joseph Osmundson
Since grade school, Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. Later, as a queer scientist, he decided not to reproduce. But when a lesbian couple asked him to be their bio-dad and co-parent, he accepted their proposition. This genre-bending memoir explores the experience of building family beyond biology.
Poetry
Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang
A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed off: the image persists, refracting and recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss. Roving, evocative, and intricate, this collection is rooted in Chang's crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze.
This collection gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile's impact on memory, identity, and futurity
Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation by Brenda Hillman
Building on previous volumes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a twentieth-century family home. The poet celebrates the layered lives of children, mothers, and non-human creatures, plunging readers into the mysteries of childhood and childhood homes.
Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza by Fady Joudah
Joudah writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the U.S., a nation complicit in that destruction. This collection captures not only the staggering grief, but the prevailing life force of a people and place enduring genocide.
This seventh collection by the acclaimed poet offers a meditation on difficulty and the powers of nature. Reflecting upon illness, grief, and change, the poems follow the progress of day and night, the movement of the seasons, and the path of water from springs to the sea.
Translated Literature
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography. When he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible—as long as he is willing to stop at nothing. This cautionary tale offers a thrilling twist on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora
Translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, European feudalism is starting to crumble. Newly widowed, Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small town to claim a plot of land and the simple life of a farmer. But when Redo begins to dig in his field, the perfectly preserved, frozen corpse of a soldier emerges. And there are more.
Night of a Thousand Hells by Intan Paramaditha
Translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao
Mutiara and Maya find their lives irrevocably altered when their younger sister, Annisa, straps a bomb to her chest and commits a devastating act of violence. As her surviving sisters grapple with grief, guilt, and unanswered questions, their search leads them to family secrets and unsettling prophecies.
Pure Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
A viral video makes the rounds in Dakar, showing an incensed crowd that gathers to dig up a grave and drag the corpse from holy ground. When Ndéné, a young professor, learns that the man's only crime was to be queer, he sets out to learn more and finds himself on an unexpected journey.
Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza by Samar Yazbeck
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
The title of this book comes from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing. Throughout 2024, Yazbek, a Syrian journalist interviewed hundreds of survivors from Gaza capturing their accounts of what may be remembered as one of the most savage military offensives of our time.
Young People's Literature
It is the late summer of 2021, and a heartbroken girl named Nora has come to France to spread her mother's ashes in the place her mother never got to see. But instead, Nora finds herself on the run through a forest in the night, taking refuge in a dark holloway. When she wakes, she soon realizes it is no longer 2021.
When Tomorrow Burns by Tae Keller
Once there was a tree. For two hundred years, there was a tree. There was a tree. There was a tree. Until the tree fell in a forest—and then there was a book. From the Newbery Medal-winning author of When You Trap a Tiger comes the story of three seventh graders on a quest to find the book that may just save their lives.
That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic by Keala Kendall
For the world's wealthiest, Kopa?a Island Resort is more than a destination. It's the ultimate escape. But their dream vacation is Lehua's nightmare. When her twin sister, Ohia, goes missing, Lehua follows her trail to Kopa?a to find her, and she discovers her missing sister isn't the island's only mystery.
The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America by David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels
Our voices are powerful, and they can make a difference. This nonfiction book offers a thoughtful look at the AIDS crisis in the U.S., highlighting the power of youth activism, how creativity and community can be vehicles for social change, and how bigotry and misinformation led to inequality in care.
Malik Page, aka Shake, dreams of making his varsity basketball squad as an eighth grader. But when Shake fractures his ankle in a championship game, he's sidelined for the first time since his first dribble. Can he rebound and make his way back onto the court—and back to feeling like himself?
Winners will be announced at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony on November 18. Each Finalist receives a prize of $1,000, a medal, and a Judges’ citation. Winners receive $10,000 and a bronze sculpture.
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