Here are the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards
By ASH WU
The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards on Tuesday across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Winners will be announced during a ceremony in New York on Nov. 18.
The foundation will also honor novelist Salman Rushdie, who was grievously injured during a stabbing in 2022, with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and pediatrician, writer and literacy advocate Perri Klass with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
Here is a full list of the finalists.
FICTION
The fiction finalists include several books about how immigration can shape personal identity. In “Paradiso 17” by Hannah Lillith Assadi, a Palestinian emigre on his deathbed recounts the story of fleeing his home in 1948 after Israeli displacement, only to spend the rest of his life adrift. A mother and daughter navigate continents and languages in Valeria Luiselli’s novel “Beginning Middle End.” And “Dèy,” by Edwidge Danticat, plumbs the emotional depths of a Haitian American real estate agent who survives a mass shooting.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli
Dèy, by Edwidge Danticat
Mad Eden, by Morgan Thomas
Paradiso 17, by Hannah Lillith Assadi
Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, by Julián Delgado Lopera
NONFICTION
Many of this year’s nonfiction finalists experiment with literary form. Camonghne Felix blends memoir with political analysis in “Let the Poets Govern.” Colin Asher’s “The Midnight Special” explores the lives of five musicians and the music they made in prison. And in “Spawning Season,” microbiologist Joseph Osmundson brings in his scientific background while describing the challenges of building a family during an era of climate change.
Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming, by Abdelrahman ElGendy
Let The Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom, by Camonghne Felix
The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, by Colin Asher
Mother Tongue, by Sara Novi
Spawning Season: An Experiment In Queer Parenthood, by Joseph Osmundson
POETRY
Collections with ecological themes dominate the poetry category. Experimental poet Victoria Chang places poems about nature and the afterlife beside embroidered photographs in “Tree of Knowledge.” Brenda Hillman’s “Still House in the Desert” examines the author’s childhood through an ecological lens, and “Bramble,” by Susan Stewart, invokes thorns as symbols of struggle.
Bramble, by Susan Stewart
Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, by Fady Joudah
Hide, by Carolina Ebeid
Still House in the Desert, by Brenda Hillman
Tree of Knowledge, by Victoria Chang
TRANSLATED LITERATURE
In translated literature, Karl Ove Knausgaard, the Norwegian author best known for his autobiographical series “My Struggle,” is a finalist for “The School of Night,” a Faustian tale of artistic success. Vicente Luis Mora’s “Centroeuropa” takes place in early-19th-century Prussia, and Samar Yazbek’s “Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life” incorporates interviews with 26 Palestinians receiving medical treatment in Doha, Qatar.
Centroeuropa, by Vicente Luis Mora; translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery
Night of a Thousand Hells, by Intan Paramaditha; translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao
Pure Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr; translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
The School of Night, by Karl Ove Knausgaard; translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza, by Samar Yazbek; translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Some of the finalists for the young people’s literature category tackle difficult subjects. Keala Kendall’s “That Which Feeds Us” makes a haunting metaphor, in more ways than one, out of colonialism in Hawaii; David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels’ “The Fight of Our Lives” teaches young readers about the AIDS epidemic; and Elana K. Arnold’s “Holloway” sends a neurodivergent Jewish teenager back in time to Paris in 1946.
The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS In America, by David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels
Holloway, by Elana K. Arnold
Shook, by Julian Randall
That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic, by Keala Kendall
When Tomorrow Burns, by Tae Keller
