Finalists have been selected for the 2026 National Book Awards. The five category winners will be named at the National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner in New York City on November 18. The winners receive $10,000, a bronze medal, and statue; finalists get $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners and finalists in the translated literature category split the prize evenly between author and translator. This year's finalists are:
Fiction
Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi (Knopf)
Dèy by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera (Liveright/W.W. Norton)
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf)
Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Nonfiction
The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music by Colin Asher (W.W. Norton)
Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming by Abdelrahman ElGendy (Hogarth/Penguin Random House)
Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom by Camonghne Felix (One World/Penguin Random House)
Mother Tongue by Sara Nović (Random House)
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Joseph Osmundson (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Poetry
Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Hide by Carolina Ebeid (Graywolf Press)
Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan University Press)
Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza by Fady Joudah (Milkweed Editions)
Bramble by Susan Stewart (University of Chicago Press)
Translated Literature
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press)
Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery (Bellevue Literary Press)
Night of a Thousand Hells by Intan Paramaditha, translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein & Tiffany Tsao (Europa Editions)
Pure Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (Other Press)
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 (Other Press)
Young People's Literature
Holloway by Elana K. Arnold (Clarion Books/HarperCollins)
When Tomorrow Burns by Tae Keller (Random House Books for Young Readers)
That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic by Keala Kendall (Random House Books for Young Readers)
The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America by David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels (Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Shook by Julian Randall (Henry Holt and Company Books for Young Readers)
Two lifetime achievement awards will also 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, presented by author Kiran Desai; and Perri Klass, pediatrician, writer, and longtime national medical director of Reach Out and Read, will receive the NBF's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented by author Jason Reynolds.