The winners of the 76th National Book Awards were announced and honored last night in a gala event in New York City, hosted by Jeff Hiller and featuring musician Corinne Bailey Rae. (Hiller's comedic memoir, Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success was published this summer by Simon & Schuster, and Bailey Rae's children's book, Put Your Records On will be published by Rocky Pond Books on March 3, 2026.) The event was a mix of the usual celebration of reading and books and authors and the industry, as well as criticism of attacks on books, the anti-immigration wave in the U.S., and U.S. support for Israel. Watch the full awards program here.
The winners:
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Rabih Alameddine |
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Fiction: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press)
Alameddine started by saying he had seen two videos yesterday morning, one of an ICE agent who tasered a woman lying "on the asphalt" who was zip tied. "Then he carried her like garbage and threw her in the back of an SUV." The other video was of a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon that was bombed, killing 12 people. "Sometimes, as writers, we have to say enough," he said. "Enough."
Among the many people and groups he acknowledged, Alameddine thanked "independent booksellers. I would not have a career without their support. Algorithms do not like me, and the feeling is mutual."
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| Omar El Akkad | |
Nonfiction: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
"It's very difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to genocide. It's difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child's body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this and that many of my elected representatives happily support it. And it is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have watched people snatched off the street by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings... We have an obligation to stand in opposition to any force, including those enacted by our own governments, that, if left unchecked, would happily decimate every principle of free expression and connection that we come here to celebrate."
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Patricia Smith |
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Poetry: The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Scribner)
Smith remembered her late mother, whose last words to her were "you ugly," and remembered spending much of her life as "a bona fide West Side Chicago colored girl" taught "that I had to escape my skin," what her mother called her "too black self... I was taught that I needed to escape the black that surrounded me, the black that kept me ugly and stupid and all the way down. I was nobody good, and I was nowhere good." But she "rose among storytellers" and last night happily imagined her mother and other late family members looking down on her at the National Book Awards, and the others saying to her mother, "That's your baby girl standing in front of all them folks. Child, look at where she is."
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Robin Myers (l.) and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara |
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Translated Literature: We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (New Directions)
Cabezón Cámara spoke in Spanish (translated by Myers), saying she was doing so "because there are fascists who don't like that." She thanked a group of people as well as "public free education in Argentina, which makes it possible for people from working class backgrounds like me to be here."
Myers noted that as she translated We Are Green and Trembling, "I thought a lot about the fact that my experience of translating it took place in two countries, Mexico and Argentina, where colonial powers sought to annihilate indigenous cultures and languages, and where those same cultures and languages continue to resist, and that [the book] has been published in my nation state of origin, this one where migrants are being persecuted and repressed, and where the government of this country continues to perpetrate and support the perpetration of the genocide of Israel against the Palestinian people."
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| Daniel Nayeri | |
Young People's Literature: The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri (Levine Querido)
Nayeri mused about luck, remembering that 10 years ago he worked as an editor on Varick Street in New York City overlooking the federal immigration building where "every day the line was around the block for asylum seekers." His own family had immigrated 20 years ago. "I didn't know how to express what it meant that I had somehow managed to be in the office and not on the street every day. Why should anybody be so lucky?" This, he continued, was a theme of The Teacher of Nomad Land, in which a young man "is trying to find some luck" for him and his sister, recently orphaned and in the mountains in Iran. "There is no accounting for luck."
Also at the gala, George Saunders was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and Roxane Gay received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Both awards were announced in September.
(photos courtesy National Book Awards)