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Find the New Yorker announcement here.
New York, NY (September 15, 2026) – The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 6 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 18, 2026. For more information and to register to watch the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
The ten titles on this year’s Translated Literature Longlist were originally published in seven different languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian—appearing for the first time as a translated language in the category—Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish. The list features nine novels and a work of nonfiction, and several of this year’s honored authors and translators have been previously recognized by the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Translator Martin Aitken was a Finalist in 2018 (Love by Hanne Ørstavik) and Longlisted in 2022 (The Employees by Olga Ravn). Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and translator Lara Vergnaud were Longlisted in 2023 for The Most Secret Memory of Men. Maria Stepanova and translator Sasha Dugdale were Longlisted in 2021 for In Memory of Memory. Translator Natasha Wimmer was Longlisted in 2019 (Space Invaders by Nona Fernández) and a Finalist in 2021 (The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández). Samar Yazbek and translator Leri Price were Finalists both in 2021 (Planet of Clay) and in 2024 (Where the Wind Calls Home). Price was also a Finalist in 2019 (Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa) and Longlisted in 2023 (No One Prayed Over Their Graves by Khaled Khalifa).
The writers and translators on the list have been recognized by numerous international prizes, including the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Dublin Literary Award, the English PEN Translates Award, the French Voices Grand Prize, Goncourt Prize, the International Booker Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie, the PEN Translation Prize, and the Taiwan National Literature Award, among others. Honorees have received fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Public Library, and more.
Two titles honored this year explore the relationship between the body, identity, and culture—and how far one must go to break free of societal expectations. Egana Djabbarova’s debut novel My Dreadful Body follows a young woman from an Azerbaijani family living in Russia, straddling languages and cultures while navigating a debilitating neurological illness. Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden, each chapter addresses a distinct body part, allowing the narrator to dissect—and make sense of—patriarchal violence, chronic pain, and diasporic identity. A literature professor wrestles with homophobia in his conservative, Islamic community after viewing a viral video of an angry crowd exhuming the body of a queer person in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Pure Men. He tests the boundaries of his religious upbringing to explore the realities of Dakar’s queer community and finds himself vulnerable to public scrutiny as he reexamines his own sexuality in this novel translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud.
Three of the Longlisted titles interrogate the lasting legacies of war, violence, and occupation, telling stories of resistance and defiance—both real and imagined. Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, Now I Surrender begins with a widow’s desperate escape into the desert near what is now the Mexico-US border. Álvaro Enrigue’s sweeping tale spans from the 1830s to present day, weaving together stories that challenge and expand the Western literary tradition and highlight the people, languages, and histories at odds with imperial forces. Eden at Dawn, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, traces a queer Palestinian romance from its inception and evolution amid war and occupation in Karim Kattan’s novel. Later, as adults, Isaac and Gabriel defy heat waves, sandstorms, and checkpoints as they travel through Jericho and attempt to start a new life together in the West Bank. Over the course of 2024, writer and journalist Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of Palestinians as they received medical treatment in Doha to ask how their lives have changed since October 7, 2023—capturing stories of unfathomable loss and violence. Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza brims with real testimonies from ordinary citizens, demonstrating the power of storytelling and the necessity, as Wafaa Asaad Abu Samaan says to Yazbek, to “tell all of this.”
Two of the 2026 Longlisted titles follow characters navigating what it means to be a contemporary artist and the impossibility of freeing oneself from the past. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The School of Night follows Kristian Hadeland, an ambitious young man who moves to London to pursue photography where he meets an enigmatic Dutch artist and a woman staging a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Years later, Kristian’s dreams come true with a retrospective of his work in New York City, but as he celebrates his success, his past returns to haunt him in this Faustian twist on modern-day morality, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. The writer “M,” living in exile from the war-waging country of “B,” discovers a newfound sense of freedom after getting lost in an unknown town of “F” on the way to a literary festival in Maria Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act. When volunteering to join a traveling circus blurs dreams and reality, M begins to question whether she’s ready to leave her profession, home country, and past behind in search of a new beginning in this novel translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale.
Characters in three of this year’s honored novels travel great distances to uncover truths about their loved ones and, ultimately, themselves. In the opening scene of Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells, the youngest of three sisters becomes a suicide bomber, compelling her surviving siblings to reckon with their turbulent family history and uncover their grandmother’s destiny-altering prophecy. Translated from the Indonesian by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao, the novel blends Indonesian folklore and Islamic mysticism in an examination of social mobility, migration, and sisterhood set across Indonesia, the United States, and Australia. Ping Lu’s To the East of the East, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, follows a Taiwanese writer who travels to Beijing in search of her missing husband, only to befriend the enigmatic Shangjun. As their romance begins to bloom, Min-Hui invites Shangjun to read her novel-in-progress in this richly layered narrative exploring marriage, autonomy, and how our personal and collective histories shape who we are. Recent widower Redo Hauptshammer arrives in a small European town in the early 1800s to claim a plot of land, where he envisions burying his wife and pursuing the life of a farmer in Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery. As Redo begins to dig up the field and uncover the bodies of several Prussian soldiers, he recruits his eccentric neighbors for help in this novel that deftly explores the legacy of war, personal and state secrets, and what may be revealed when we excavate the past.
Publishers submitted a total of 159 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The judges for Translated Literature are Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Javier García del Moral, John Keene, Christopher Merrill (Chair), and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.
Egana Djabbarova, My Dreadful Body
Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden
New Vessel Press
Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Karim Kattan, Eden at Dawn
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Restless Books
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House
Ping Lu, To the East of the East
Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
World Editions
Vicente Luis Mora, Centroeuropa
Translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery
Bellevue Literary Press
Intan Paramaditha, Night of a Thousand Hells
Translated from the Indonesian by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao
Europa Editions
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Pure Men
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Other Press
Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act
Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
New Directions Publishing
Samar Yazbek, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Other Press
