National Book Awards 2026 finalists announced; Edwidge Danticat is a three-time finalist

The finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards were announced on the morning of Tuesday, 6 October, according to NPR. NPR reported that Edwidge Danticat is now a three-time finalist for the award. Her novel Dèy is about a woman who witnesses a violent gun attack in a Miami mall, according to NPR.

The other fiction finalists, as listed by NPR, are Hannah Lillith Assadi for Paradiso 17, Julián Delgado Lopera for Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You, Valeria Luiselli for Beginning Middle End, and Morgan Thomas for Mad Eden. NPR described Thomas as a debut novelist. NPR said Mad Eden is a story that blends forms, following a patient navigator at a center providing gender-affirming care (care that supports a person's gender identity).

In nonfiction, NPR listed Camonghne Felix for Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom, which NPR said is both a memoir and a call-to-action drawing on Felix's background as a communications strategist. The other nonfiction finalists are Colin Asher for The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, Sara Nović for Mother Tongue, Joseph Osmundson for Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood, and Abdelrahman ElGendy for Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming. NPR said ElGendy's book explores his time in an Egyptian prison.

NPR listed the poetry finalists as Victoria Chang for Tree of Knowledge, Carolina Ebeid for Hide, Brenda Hillman for Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation, Fady Joudah for Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, and Susan Stewart for Bramble. In translated literature, NPR named Karl Ove Knausgaard's The School of Night, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken; Vicente Luis Mora's Centroeuropa, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery; Intan Paramaditha's Night of a Thousand Hells, translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao; Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's Pure Men, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud; and Samar Yazbek's Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price.

The young people's literature finalists, according to NPR, are Elana K. Arnold for Holloway, Tae Keller for When Tomorrow Burns, Keala Kendall for That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels for The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America, and Julian Randall for Shook. NPR reported that the winners will be announced on 18 November 2026.