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Twenty-five Finalists to contend for National Book Awards in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature

New York, NY – The 25 Finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature were announced today with the New York Times. The five Finalists in each category were selected by a distinguished panel of judges and were advanced from the Longlists announced in September with The New Yorker. 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.

Across the five categories, 14 authors and translators have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: translator Martin Aitken was a 2018 Finalist for Love by Hanne Ørstavik and 2022 Longlister for The Employees by Olga Ravn; Elana K. Arnold was a 2017 Finalist for Young People’s Literature for What Girls Are Made Of; Hannah Lillith Assadi was a 2018 5 Under 35 honoree for Sonora; Victoria Chang was a 2020 Longlister for Poetry for Obit; Edwidge Danticat was a 1995 Finalist for Fiction for Krik? Krak! and a 2007 Finalist for Nonfiction for Brother, I’m Dying; Camonghne Felix was a 2019 Longlister for Poetry for Build Yourself a Boat; Brenda Hillman was a 2013 Longlister for Poetry for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire; Fady Joudah was a 2024 Finalist for Poetry for […]; David Levithan was a 2013 Longlister for Young People’s Literature for Two Boys Kissing; and Valeria Luiselli was a 2014 5 Under 35 honoree for Faces in the Crowd. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and translator Lara Vergnaud were Longlisted in 2023 for The Most Secret Memory of Men; Samar Yazbek and translator Leri Price were Finalists in 2021 for Planet of Clay and in 2024 for Where the Wind Calls Home; and 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). Seven independent publishers and two university presses are represented.

“We are grateful to the 25 judges that collectively read nearly 2,000 books published this year in order to elevate our 2026 Finalists,” said David Steinberger, Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. “The National Book Awards fuels the Foundation’s year-round work to reach readers of all ages in every corner of the country, connecting readers with books, authors, timely conversations—and one another. This year’s Finalists join a rich 77-year Awards history, and we are honored to celebrate these exceptional books this fall and onwards.”

“At the National Book Foundation, we’re proud to celebrate reading and create extraordinary experiences around books year-round,” said Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation. “Across the Finalists for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature, readers will be able to dive into stories at once both familiar and new—to learn, to be inspired, and to participate in a vibrant discussion around books. I am deeply grateful to our judges for this gift to readers—and for the reminder of the indispensable power of literature to bring us together.”

The 2026 Finalists will read from their work at the National Book Awards Finalist Reading on the evening of Tuesday, November 17 at NYU Skirball. The event will be hosted by Traci Thomas, creator and host of the critically acclaimed literary podcast The Stacks. The Finalist Reading is an annual ticketed event presented in partnership with the NYU Creative Writing Program, open to the public and livestreamed for readers everywhere. Purchase in-person tickets via NYU Skirball’s box office, and register for the livestream via Eventbrite.

On the morning of Tuesday, November 17, the Finalists in Young People’s Literature gather for Teens Read the 2026 National Book Awards, hosted by Maulik Pancholy, award-winning actor, author, and activist. Teens Read is a special in-person event presented for free for New York City’s middle and high school students at Symphony Space, and livestreamed for readers of all ages nationwide. The event will feature readings, Q&A, and book signings for in-person attendees. Educators and school librarians from around the country can register for the free livestream. Educators who refer a fellow teacher from a different school for the livestream will be entered in a raffle to receive one set of the Finalist titles. For more information and to register, please visit nationalbook.org/teens-read.

The 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner will be livestreamed for readers everywhere on the Foundation’s website and YouTube. Winners of the National Book Awards receive $10,000, a bronze medal, and statue; Finalists receive $1,000 and a bronze medal; Winners and Finalists in the Translated Literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator. Two lifetime achievement awards will be presented as part of the evening’s ceremony: Salman Rushdie, novelist, essayist, and public intellectual, will be recognized with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL), presented by bestselling author Kiran Desai; and Perri Klass, pediatrician, writer, and longtime National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented by two-time National Book Award Finalist and past National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds.

The National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner drives funding for the Foundation’s year-round educational and public programming to connect readers of all ages, in every corner of the country, with books and authors. The Foundation’s programming reaches readers in all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, providing free books to children and families living in public housing communities; bringing authors, translators, and readers together for timely conversations; and supporting teachers who encourage a lifelong love of reading in their students. For more information about the Foundation’s work, including the National Book Awards, please visit nationalbook.org.

Publishers submitted a total of 1,912 books for this year’s National Book Awards: 451 in Fiction, 727 in Nonfiction, 285 in Poetry, 159 in Translated Literature, and 290 in Young People’s Literature. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.

2026 Finalists for the National Book Award for Fiction:

Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paradiso 17
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Edwidge Danticat, Dèy
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Julián Delgado Lopera, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

Valeria Luiselli, Beginning Middle End
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Morgan Thomas, Mad Eden
MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

In Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sufien shares his life story from his deathbed: forced to flee Palestine as a child during the 1948 Nakba, he spends the rest of his life searching for home, across countries and decades, asking the unanswerable question of belonging after exile. Magnolia, a Haitian American real estate agent living in Miami, struggles to tell her family the truth after surviving a mass shooting in Edwidge Danticat’s novel Dèy, a meditation on mourning, immigration, gentrification, and diasporic identity. Set in 1990s Bogotá, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You tells the story of a father and daughter learning to live with each other after the mother’s death in Julián Delgado Lopera’s exploration of Colombia’s queer underground community, violence, and the consequences that come with rejecting your true self. Beginning Middle End spans continents, languages, and four generations, following a mother-daughter duo reconstructing their lives amid the mother’s divorce and daughter’s adolescence in Valeria Luiselli’s examination of generational memory and legacy. Morgan Thomas’s debut novel Mad Eden blurs time and genre, interspersing the story of Ro—a trans healthcare worker who was recently diagnosed with autism—with excerpts from the eponymous online fantasy story, exploring what it means to seek joy and care in an increasingly hostile world.

2026 Finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction:

Colin Asher, The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
W. W. Norton & Company

Abdelrahman ElGendy, Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming
Hogarth / Penguin Random House

Camonghne Felix, Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom
One World / Penguin Random House

Sara Nović, Mother Tongue
Random House / Penguin Random House

Joseph Osmundson, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
Bloomsbury Publishing

In The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, Colin Asher merges biography with musical analysis and paints the portrait of five 20th century musicians and the albums they created while in prison to show how policing and the criminal justice system have impacted music culture—and vice versa. Two years after the revolution that sparked hope for a free Egypt, teenage student activist Abdelrahman ElGendy and his father were arrested at a brutal police crackdown during a mass demonstration, and he shares their story of political resistance, survival, and liberation in the face of authoritarianism in Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming. Camonghne Felix’s Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom blends memoir, literary analysis, and political criticism as Felix shares her experience coming of age in New York later working in politics, arguing that language can help us imagine and build new forms of governance and organization outside of our current oppressive systems. Mother Tongue traces Sara Nović’s hearing loss as a child, finding their place in the deaf community, and parenting two young sons—one adopted and deaf, one biological and hearing—alongside a history of discrimination against deaf and disabled communities in the United States in her debut memoir. Queer microbiologist Joseph Osmundson’s Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood blends memoir and science writing as he grapples with bringing a child into a world experiencing climate change and political upheaval, and considers what it means to build a family beyond biology and across racial divides.

2026 Finalists for the National Book Award for Poetry:

Victoria Chang, Tree of Knowledge
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

Carolina Ebeid, Hide
Graywolf Press

Brenda Hillman, Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation
Wesleyan University Press

Fady Joudah, Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza
Milkweed Editions

Susan Stewart, Bramble
University of Chicago Press

Victoria Chang’s Tree of Knowledge contemplates art, nature, death, and the afterlife through poems interspersed with embroidered photography, featuring a central poem that examines the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, asking who has the right to remain and flourish—in this country and on this earth. Carolina Ebeid interlaces American English, Palestinian Arabic, and Cuban Spanish as she excavates memories—of her Palestinian father and Cuban mother’s forced migrations—in order to reconstruct her own ancestry and chart her path forward in Hide. Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation is the last collection in Brenda Hillman’s quartet about time—the days, seasons, and years that make up our lives—an ecological journey into her childhood home and meditation on the people, things, and spaces that raise us. Palestinian American physician Fady Joudah contemplates his split role as a witness to the ongoing destruction of Gaza and as a physician living in a country complicit in that very destruction, presenting poems, images, and translations of unknowable grief and steadfast resilience that refuses the ongoing erasure of Palestine in Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza. Susan Stewart’s Bramble evokes ballads, fairy tales, and the biblical book of Judges in a three-part contemplation on contradiction, entanglement, and struggle that explores personal suffering and change, applying that philosophy to the world around us.

2026 Finalists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature:

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House

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

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

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The School of Night follows the life of Kristian Hadeland, an ambitious photographer who moves to London in his twenties and, as he celebrates his successful career through a retrospective of his work in New York City years later, is haunted by his past in this Faustian twist on modern-day morality, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken. In Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery, recent widower Redo Hauptshammer uncovers the bodies of several Prussian soldiers buried in his plot of land and recruits the help of his eccentric neighbors in this novel that deftly explores the legacy of war, personal and state secrets, and what may be revealed when we excavate the past. 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, in an examination of social mobility, migration, and sisterhood, translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao. 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, finding himself vulnerable to public scrutiny as he reexamines his own sexuality in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Pure Men, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud. 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 in Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.

2026 Finalists for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature:

Elana K. Arnold, Holloway
Clarion Books / HarperCollins Publishers

Tae Keller, When Tomorrow Burns
Random House Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Keala Kendall, That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic
Random House Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels, The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America
Knopf Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Julian Randall, Shook
Henry Holt and Company (BYR) / Macmillan Publishers

In Elana K. Arnold’s Holloway, Nora, a neurodivergent Jewish teenager, travels to Paris in the summer of 2021, but her journey takes an unexpected turn when she ends up in the summer of 1946 in this story of generational trauma, healing, and forgiveness. Three middle school students—Nomi, Vi, and Arthur—journey to find a mysterious book of prophecies that might change their lives in When Tomorrow Burns, Tae Keller’s novel about the power of friendship, community, and hope. That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic by Keala Kendall follows a native Hawaiian teen searching for her missing twin sister in a secluded luxury island resort where she must face ghosts and interrogate the lasting effects of colonization on Hawai‘i and its people. Through first-person interviews, poetry, essays, speeches, obituaries, artwork, and more, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels capture the magnitude of the AIDS crisis in the United States for young readers and demonstrate the importance of youth activism to create social change in The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America. Shook by Julian Randall, with illustrations by Nathan Walker, stars Malik “Shake” Page, a 12-year-old who learns to cope with his anxiety when his dreams of making the varsity basketball team are shattered by an ankle fracture in this novel-in-verse that highlights the importance of asking for—and accepting—help.

The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Fiction

Find the New Yorker announcement here.

The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction 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 77^th 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 2026 Fiction Longlist features two debut novels among the ten titles. Six authors on the Longlist have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: Hannah Lillith Assadi, a 2018 5 Under 35 honoree for Sonora; Kimberly Blaeser, a 2026 Science + Literature honoree for Ancient Light; Edwidge Danticat, a 1995 Finalist for Fiction for Krik? Krak! and a 2007 Finalist for Nonfiction for Brother, I’m Dying; Louise Erdrich, a 1999 Finalist for Young People’s Literature for The Birchbark House, a 2001 Finalist for Fiction for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and the Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House; Marlon James, a 2019 Finalist for Fiction for Black Leopard, Red Wolf; and Valeria Luiselli, a 2014 5 Under 35 honoree for Faces in the Crowd.

This year’s honorees include fellows from the Guggenheim Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, and a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate. The Longlisted authors have been previously honored by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the American Book Award, the Aspen Literary Prize, the Booker Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Story Prize, and more.

Three works Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction transcend genre and defy categorization to, ultimately, prioritize human connection. Louise Erdrich’s story collection features an expansive cast of human and nonhuman characters—a young girl and a guard dog, the editor of a tribal newsletter, a Burmese python, a Venetian vampire, and many more. Accompanied by commissioned illustrations by Erdrich’s daughter Aza Erdrich Abe, Python’s Kiss is a meditation on the lineages we descend from, and the many ways in which our lives—and afterlives—are linked with people, animals, and land surrounding us. Poet Kimberly Blaeser’s debut story collection explores themes of displacement and belonging through the lives of contemporary Anishinaabe characters. Blending horror, humor, and the supernatural, the stories in Red Ants tackle the reality and mythos of advanced technology, missing and found family, and life on and off of the Rez. Ro—a trans healthcare worker who was recently diagnosed with autism—and their partner Liam live in a secluded cabin in rural Florida in Morgan Thomas’s Mad Eden. This debut novel blurs time and genre, interspersing Ro’s story with excerpts from the eponymous online fantasy story, and exploring what it means to seek joy and care in an increasingly hostile world.

Three Longlisted titles explore how memory and grief shift over time, and how we make sense of ourselves in the aftermath of unspeakable violence. Magnolia, a Haitian American real estate agent living in Miami, struggles to tell her family the truth after surviving a mass shooting in Edwidge Danticat’s novel Dèy. As Magnolia excavates her relationships and responsibilities from Haiti to the United States, she reflects on violence—in her home country and adopted country—and the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification, and diasporic identity. Set in Kingston, Jamaica in 1988, The Disappearers follows the aftermath of a brutal, homophobic mob attack against eight Black and mixed-race gay men at a play rehearsal—where one man is murdered. Chronicled by multiple narrators over time, Marlon James’s queer epic is both a crime thriller and sociocultural study of the early years of the AIDS epidemic about erasure and connection, violence and desire, and the cost of living authentically. In Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sufien is forced to flee from Palestine as a child during the 1948 Nakba and then spends the rest of his life searching for home—materially, in Kuwait, Italy, and the United States, and metaphorically, in women, family, and work. Sufien shares his life story from his deathbed, weaving a tale that transcends countries and decades, inspired by Assadi’s late father and the unanswerable question of belonging after exile.

Parents and children are at the heart of two other Longlisted titles, exploring family curses, inheritance, and reinvention. Spanning continents, languages, and four generations, readers follow a mother-daughter duo as they reconstruct their lives amid the mother’s divorce and daughter’s adolescence in Beginning Middle End. Valeria Luiselli’s novel charts the pair’s road trip to Sicily, where they each grapple with their legacy—a grandmother with signs of dementia and an ancient artifact that may or may not be cursed—in this examination of generational memory. Set in 1990s Bogotá, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You tells the story of a father and daughter learning to live with each other after the mother’s death—Ignacio, a man haunted by the young man he once loved, and Valentina, his lonely teenage daughter. As Valentina seeks the truth about her parents’ past, Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel explores Colombia’s queer underground community, violence, and the consequences that come with rejecting your true self.

Everyday settings transform and entrap in two of this year’s Longlisted titles, challenging their characters’ relationships to place, the past, and with one another. The protagonist of Kenan Orhan’s debut novel The Renovation cares for her dying father and anxiety-riddled husband after migrating from her native Istanbul to Italy. While struggling to secure a job, she becomes engrossed with home improvement projects and discovers that her second-floor bathroom has transformed into a Turkish prison cell—with guards and fellow inmates—in this story about migration, memory, and the meaning of home. Septuagenarian Ivan is stranded in an airport with his twenty-something daughter in Passengers, forcing the two to confront their strained relationship and a lifetime of emotional wounds. As their departure time is repeatedly delayed, Alexander Maksik examines the love between a parent and child in unlikely circumstances, and what it takes to protect ourselves and our loved ones as the world collapses around us.

Publishers submitted a total of 451 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Fiction. The judges for Fiction are Matt Bell, Caro De Robertis (Chair), Danielle King, Akhil Sharma, and Diane Wilson. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.

2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction:

Hannah Lillith Assadi, Paradiso 17
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Kimberly Blaeser, Red Ants
Counterpoint Press

Edwidge Danticat, Dèy
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Julián Delgado Lopera, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You
Liveright / W. W. Norton & Company

Louise Erdrich, Python’s Kiss
Harper / HarperCollins Publishers

Marlon James, The Disappearers 
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House

Valeria Luiselli, Beginning Middle End
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Alexander Maksik, Passengers
Europa Editions

Kenan Orhan, The Renovation
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

Morgan Thomas, Mad Eden
MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Poetry

Find the New Yorker announcement here.

The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry 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 77^th 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.

Four of the ten poets are past honorees for the National Book Award for Poetry: Victoria Chang was Longlisted in 2020 for Obit, Brenda Hillman was Longlisted in 2013 for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, Fady Joudah was a Finalist in 2024 for […], and Layli Long Soldier was a Finalist in 2017 for WHEREAS. Four of this year’s Longlisted titles come from independent publishers, and three come from university presses.

The poets on this year’s Longlist have been supported by the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation, and more. They have been recognized by the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the California Book Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Whiting Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and others. Among the poets are a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a current Poet Laureate of the Navajo Nation.

Two of this year’s Longlisters explore the power of language as a tool for understanding ourselves, our ancestry, and our shared futures. Layli Long Soldier wields different forms of storytelling and knowledge sharing in her latest collection, We—“we” in English, the first-person plural pronoun, and “wé” in Lakota, the “blood” that connects the Lakota people to one another and to the land. Blending poetry, essay, and original artwork, Long Soldier examines what it means to be in collaboration and community with Indigenous culture across time and space. Carolina Ebeid excavates memories—of her Palestinian father and Cuban mother’s forced migrations—in order to reconstruct her own ancestry and chart her path forward. Interlacing American English, Palestinian Arabic, and Cuban Spanish, Hide deconstructs the confines of place and language, collapsing distances and liberating meaning.

Three Poetry collections examine space and displacement, asking how we find home and belonging in an ever-changing world. Haunted by a eucalyptus tree cut down on her street, Victoria Chang contemplates art, nature, death, and the afterlife in her latest collection of poetry interspersed with embroidered photography. Tree of Knowledge’s central poem examines the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, asking who has the right to remain and flourish—in this country and on this earth. Jake Skeets’s latest collection is inspired by the discovery of 200 dead horses on Navajo land, tracing the shifting geographical and cultural landscapes of the Navajo Nation alongside the evolution of language. Through the lens of a queer, Indigenous poet, Horses considers how the body and the land are inseparable and relational forces amidst the growing threat of climate catastrophe. Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation is the last collection in Brenda Hillman’s quartet about time—the days, seasons, and years that make up our lives—surveyed through an ecological journey into her childhood home. Exploring dream-like rooms, domestic objects, and human interactions with non-human creatures, this collection meditates on the people, things, and spaces that raise us.

Two Longlisted works explore the tension of witness and survival, of healing and destruction, and of writing yourself and your people into existence. Palestinian American physician Fady Joudah contemplates his split role as a witness to the ongoing destruction of Gaza and as a physician living in a country complicit in that very destruction. Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza refuses the ongoing erasure of Palestine, presenting poems, images, and translations of unknowable grief and steadfast resilience to create an affirmation of Palestinian life. Jonah Mixon-Webster takes readers on a three-party journey of a haunted and haunting rebirth, informed by the poet’s upbringing in Flint, Michigan. Promise/Threat delves into the dreams and nightmares of the poet’s youth, his inner psyche as a Black man in modern America, and his candid realization that the “real poem is the life I’m writing.”

This year’s Longlist features three works that borrow from mythology, religion, and history to reflect the poets’ personal journeys and reimagine the cultural contexts of present-day existence. Richie Hofmann’s queer coming-of-age collection The Bronze Arms explores Greek myths, sex and love, and the vulnerability of the human body. At the core of this collection lies the memory of nearly drowning in a pool as a child, which serves an anchor for Hofmann to examine risk and rescue, abandonment and intimacy, and the universal desire to survive. Jake Rose’s debut poetry collection reimagines Joan of Arc’s life and transforms her body, mind, and legacy into a historical framework that explores queer identity and desire. Merging biography and autobiography, JOAN grapples with what it means to embrace—and transform—oneself through art, language, and gender expression. The eponymous bramble in Susan Stewart’s collection evokes ballads, fairy tales, and the biblical book of Judges in a three-part meditation on contradiction, entanglement, and struggle. Suffused with song, poetry, and elegy, Bramble explores personal suffering and change and then applies that philosophy to the world around us.

Publishers submitted a total of 285 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Poetry. The judges for Poetry are Rob Arnold, Aracelis Girmay (Chair), Jon Pineda, Roger Reeves, and Rosanna Warren. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.

2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Poetry:

Victoria Chang, Tree of Knowledge
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers

Carolina Ebeid, Hide
Graywolf Press

Brenda Hillman, Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation
Wesleyan University Press

Richie Hofmann, The Bronze Arms
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Fady Joudah, Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza
Milkweed Editions

Layli Long Soldier, We
Graywolf Press

Jonah Mixon-Webster, Promise/Threat
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Jake Rose, JOAN
University of Chicago Press

Jake Skeets, Horses
Milkweed Editions

Susan Stewart, Bramble
University of Chicago Press

The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Nonfiction

Find the New Yorker announcement here.

The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction 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 77^th 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 2026 Nonfiction Longlist includes emerging and established writers, and features works of criticism, reportage, memoir, science writing, and more. Nine of the authors on the 2026 Nonfiction Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees, and one has been previously honored: Camonghne Felix, a Longlister for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Build Yourself a Boat.

This year’s Longlist includes Fellows from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mass MoCA, the McKnight Foundation, New America, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. The Longlisted authors have been previously honored by the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, National Magazine Award in Reporting, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, the Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press, and more. Their work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Believer, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Guernica, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Nation, Ploughshares, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, and Words Without Borders, among others.

Two Longlisters investigate language, art, and music as tools that can exploit or liberate depending on the power structures at play. Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom blends memoir, literary analysis, and political criticism as Camonghne Felix shares her experience coming of age in New York, learning about the Black radical literary traditions of Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde. The poet and activist reflects on her work in politics and argues that language can help us imagine and build a new form of governance outside of our current oppressive systems. In The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, Colin Asher paints the portrait of five 20^th century musicians and the albums they created while in prison to show how policing and the criminal justice system has impacted music culture—and vice versa. Asher merges biography with musical analysis in this fierce indictment of the racism behind both the American prison system and the record industry.

Three Longlisted works explore the complexities of parenthood and caregiving in the 21^st century, asking how we survive in an unstable world. Queer microbiologist Joseph Osmundson always dreamed of being pregnant, and when his best friend and her partner ask him to be the biological father and co-parent of their child, he accepts. A blend of memoir and science writing, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood grapples with bringing a child into a world experiencing climate change and political upheaval, and what it means to build a family beyond biology and across racial divides. Mother Tongue traces Sara Nović’s hearing loss as a child and finding her place in the deaf community alongside her experience of parenting of two young sons—one adopted and deaf, and one biological and hearing. In her debut memoir, Nović interrogates the history of discrimination against deaf and disabled communities in the United States, and the capacity to endure and build a family in the face of stigma and systemic oppression. Angela Pelster’s essay collection taps into humanity’s ability to adapt and evolve in the face of crises, personal and planetary. The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming chronicles the author’s experiences of surviving a tumultuous divorce, experiencing homelessness as a single mother, and navigating political and economic instability—all while remaining open to the beauty and possibility in the world and in ourselves.

Three 2026 Longlisters question the possibility of neutrality across race, class, and social divides, past and present. Zayd Ayers Dohrn writes of his childhood as the son of fugitive parents, both founding members of radical Vietnam War–era group the Weather Underground. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground is both a family memoir and a work of deep reporting that draws from interviews, declassified FBI files, letters, photos, and journals to tell a story of radical resistance and the often complex contradictions between personal and political values. Journalist Wil Haygood draws parallels between the Vietnam War—which disproportionally sent Black Americans to the front lines—and the civil rights movement in the United States. In The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home, Haygood chronicles the lives of seven Black soldiers who served in Vietnam, a biracial piano player, a groundbreaking Black reporter, and several other Black Americans, situating them alongside cultural and political moments that shaped the 1960s to today. At the core of Wendy S. Walters’s work of criticism is white paint—the default color that coats the spaces and structures surrounding us, and the supposedly “neutral” symbol of ordinary, clean, and even pure. By examining the role of white paint in art history, architecture, and Walters’s own life, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint makes the case that our decision—subconscious or not—to rely on white paint as the standard color reveals more about our personal and cultural psyches than we may realize.

Two Longlisted titles highlight personal experiences of violence situated within broader systems of oppression to reveal the material costs of dehumanization. Chronicling the lives of four families across eight decades, journalist Rozina Ali demonstrates how the War on Terror and post-9/11 scrutiny of Muslim communities across the United States was built on decades of mass surveillance, increased violence, and Islamophobia. Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America reveals the pervasiveness of anti-Islamic sentiment in US policies and politics; its direct, devastating impact on countless lives; and the media’s role in its normalization. Two years after the revolution that sparked hope for a free Egypt, teenage student activist Abdelrahman ElGendy and his father were arrested at a brutal police crackdown during a mass demonstration, to then spend six years contending with bureaucracy and corruption while in prison. Fortified by the Arab world’s most enduring revolution song, “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”—translated as “We Will Remain Here”—Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming is the story of political resistance, survival, and liberation in the face of authoritarianism.

Publishers submitted a total of 727 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The judges for Nonfiction are Eve L. Ewing, Audrey I-Wei Huang, Jonathan C. Slaght, Robert Warrior (Chair), and Lidia Yuknavitch. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.

2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction:

Rozina Ali, Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America
Crown / Penguin Random House

Colin Asher, The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
W. W. Norton & Company

Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
W. W. Norton & Company

Abdelrahman ElGendy, Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming
Hogarth / Penguin Random House

Camonghne Felix, Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom
One World / Penguin Random House

Wil Haygood, The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Sara Nović, Mother Tongue
Random House / Penguin Random House

Joseph Osmundson, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
Bloomsbury Publishing

Angela Pelster, The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming
Milkweed Editions

Wendy S. Walters, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint
Scribner / Simon & Schuster

The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Translated Literature

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 77^th 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.

2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature:

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

The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature

Find the New Yorker announcement here.

The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (YPL) 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 77^th 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.

This year’s Longlist includes two past honorees for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature: Elana K. Arnold, a 2017 Finalist for What Girls Are Made Of, and David Levithan, a 2013 Longlister for Two Boys Kissing. The list also includes one publisher appearing on the Longlists for the first time: Peachtree Publishing. The authors on this year’s Longlist have been honored by the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Newbery Honor, the Printz Award, the Pushcart Prize, and many others. Through fiction, nonfiction, novels-in-verse, and a picture book, the 2026 Young People’s Literature Longlisted titles feature coming-of-age stories that inspire readers of all ages to revisit our collective histories in order to shape a better tomorrow.

Three of this year’s honorees bridge the gap between past, present, and speculative futures through different genres—historical fiction, narrative nonfiction, and horror. Nora, a neurodivergent Jewish teenager, travels to Paris during the summer of 2021 to lay her vaccine-skeptic mother to rest following her death from COVID-19 complications in Elana K. Arnold’s Holloway. When Nora wakes up in the summer of 1946, her journey takes an unexpected turn, and she must find a way to honor herself and her mother in this story about generational trauma, healing, and forgiveness. Through first-person interviews, poetry, essays, speeches, obituaries, artwork, and more, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels capture the magnitude of the AIDS crisis in the United States for young readers. By threading together cultural and historical touchpoints, key figures, and medical milestones, The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America demonstrates the importance of youth activism to create social change. That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic by Keala Kendall interrogates the lasting effects of colonization on Hawai‘i and its people, embedding Indigenous folklore within a supernatural thriller. When a native Hawaiian teen travels to a secluded luxury island resort in search of her missing twin sister, she must face the ghosts that eat away at cultures, stories, and—unless we fight back—our own souls.

Creative writing, sports, and mental health intersect in two of this year’s honored titles, both through novel-in-verse. Delali Adjoa’s debut The Free Verse Society follows Jae Aƒenyo, a teen mom who placed her baby for adoption and intends to keep her past a secret, and Derek Patel, a talented athlete navigating his father’s death and mother’s health issues. As the newest members of the poetry club, the teens clash while planning an end-of-semester poetry reading before learning how the written word can build bridges and repair hearts. Shook by Julian Randall stars Malik “Shake” Page, a 12-year-old whose big dreams of making the varsity basketball team come to a halt when he fractures his ankle. After his injury, Shake starts therapy to cope with his anxiety and reimagine his life off the court in this novel-in-verse, with illustrations by Nathan Walker, that highlights the importance of asking for—and accepting—help.

The 2026 Young People’s Literature Longlist features two titles with characters whose hobbies—zine-making and fashion design—open up the world to them. Best friends Luna Noon and Scott Mango create zines that capture a range of young adult topics—from periods to queerness. When one of the zines catapults Luna into the popular crowd, she must contend with what, if anything, she’s willing to sacrifice to be accepted by her peers. The Moon Without Stars, written and illustrated by Chanel Miller, is a story about self-exploration, friendship, and the life-changing, but often awkward, middle school experience. Eric Darnell Pritchard and illustrator Shannon Wright bring a picture book to this year’s Longlist with a biography of the Black fashion designer Patrick Kelly. Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams tells the story of a young boy from Vicksburg, Mississippi who discovered a passion in sewing clothing for people who, like him, don’t quite fit in. Clothes to Make You Smile is a joyful celebration of diverse body shapes, sizes, and skin colors that brims with self-love, self-expression, and self-acceptance.

Three 2026 Longlisters take readers on journeys across the universe, from Seattle, to the moon, to the great unknowns of outer space. Three middle school students—Nomi, Vi, and Arthur—set off on a journey to find a mysterious book of prophecies that might change their lives in When Tomorrow Burns. As raging wildfires pollute their Seattle hometown, the trio’s paths diverge and collide, and Tae Keller reminds readers of the transformative—and even magical—power of friendship, community, and hope. In Life on the Moon, written by Matthew Swanson and illustrated by Robbi Behr, 12-year-old Leo Brightstar is sent to live on the first moon colony, but things quickly go astray when his dad is sent on a mission from which he never returns. Residents of the moon colony live by an odd and contradictory set of rules, which embolden Leo to explore further, ask questions, and raise his voice about the life he finds, on the moon and across the universe. In another corner of space, we meet Ishara Ming—the only survivor of a spaceship destroyed by a legendary sentient spacecraft, the Ballena. When a mysterious ship mechanic asks to join Ishara’s ragtag interstellar crew in search of vengeance and adventure, the misfits instead find family and discover what it means to belong across space and time in T. A. Chan’s debut novel The Celestial Seas.

Publishers submitted a total of 290 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The judges for Young People’s Literature are Edith Campbell, Brandy Colbert (Chair), Tricia Ebarvia, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, and Anne Ursu. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.

2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature:

Delali Adjoa, The Free Verse Society
Peachtree Teen / Peachtree Publishing

Elana K. Arnold, Holloway
Clarion Books / HarperCollins Publishers

T. A. Chan, The Celestial Seas
Viking Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Tae Keller, When Tomorrow Burns
Random House Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Keala Kendall, That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic
Random House Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels, The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America
Knopf Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Chanel Miller, The Moon Without Stars 
Philomel Books / Penguin Random House

Eric Darnell Pritchard and Shannon Wright, Clothes to Make You Smile: Patrick Kelly Designs His Dreams
Abrams Books for Young Readers / Abrams

Julian Randall, Shook
Henry Holt and Company (BYR) / Macmillan Publishers

Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, Life on the Moon
Knopf Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House

Header Photo Credit: Christian Rodriguez

May 20, 2026

Dear Readers,

This week, I celebrate five years at the National Book Foundation, on the heels of rolling out our ambitious new strategic plan for the five years ahead.

I’m so grateful to you for caring about books, and so proud of all that we’ve accomplished together over these years in support of books and reading:

• Honored 250 extraordinary books through the National Book Awards; named 30 debut novelists to watch through 5 Under 35; and celebrated 15 works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry that bring science to life through Science + Literature
• Collaborated on the Inside Literary Prize—the first major US book prize judged by currently incarcerated readers—alongside Freedom Reads, the Center for Justice Innovation, and Lori Feathers
• Distributed over 1.7 million new, free books to children and families in 63 public housing communities across the US
• Brought over 275 authors to communities across 30 states, DC, and Puerto Rico for free, co-curated events
• Launched a new Teacher Fellowship supporting 22 teachers and over 3,600 students
• Built our capacity to do this work, including growing our staff from six to 13; made all internships paid; created two strategic plans to carry us to the 75th National Book Awards and, now, to the 80th; upgraded our technology; and more than doubled our budget

All of this work has prepared us to meet the current moment, when books are threatened in interconnected and unprecedented ways, through book bans, attacks on the freedom to read, and an erosion of public support and funding. It is a daunting moment—I never imagined that in my lifetime I would see books attacked in the ways they are right now.

And yet, there are also reasons for us to have hope. Book sales continue to grow each year, and a recent survey by Bain revealed that 60% of people wish they read more—the only media people reported wanting to consume more of—and that parents overwhelmingly want their children to develop a love of reading.

This April, over spring break for NYC public schools, I joined three-time National Book Award Finalist Rita Williams-Garcia for a visit to New York City Housing Authority’s Gun Hill Community Center in the Bronx. Eighty students gathered for a morning of book and art making before listening to Rita tell the story of her life as a writer, showing pictures of books she wrote and illustrated as a young girl and the covers of her 13 books—or, what she called, “Living in the plan of my dreams.” The students listened eagerly and asked lots of questions, including a boy who asked how writing had changed Rita’s life. She responded that when her first book sold in 1987, she had been on the verge of losing her apartment; selling her first book allowed her to keep her home and to build a life in books, following that plan of her dreams. I saw the girl in front of me sit up taller and clutch something tightly. As students lined up to get their books signed before a pizza lunch, I glanced down at the little girl, perched on the very edge of her seat, and saw she was gripping a construction paper book of her own, the cover adorned with the brightly-colored words, “My Dream.”

At the National Book Foundation, our work is to honor extraordinary books like Rita’s, ensure more readers find them, and create opportunities for little girls like this one to meet authors, build their home libraries, and follow their own stories and dreams.

I feel proud of and grateful for all that we have accomplished together on behalf of books, and I’m also excited for the plans we have for the five years ahead. Our new five-year strategic plan, Championing Books: Deepening Connections, Community, and Our Commitment to Readers, is about being brave on behalf of books, reaching more readers, and building community around reading. In the five years ahead, we’ll work to:

• Secure a streaming partner for the National Book Awards, to ensure the honored books reach the widest possible audiences and reinforce the central role that books play in our culture
• Present authors in 125 free events in every corner of the country, reaching 40,000+ adults through co-curated literary events with local partners
• Distribute 1.6M free books to children and families in 72 public housing communities, adding 10 new communities over the five years
• Pilot a geographic strategy, focusing our expansion on rural and Tribal communities who have the least access to books and literary events
• Support 40 teachers in projects that build a joy of reading in their school or classroom
• Re-design our website to better connect readers to books, and build our capacity to do all this work

This is a moment when books need all of us—as readers, as advocates, as champions. There is so much critical work ahead, but we can’t do it without your help.

DONATE

I hope you’ll consider joining our campaign in support of books. We need you. And books need all of us.

Yours in reading, and in dreams and pizza,

Ruth Dickey, Executive Director