Twenty-five Finalists to contend for National Book Awards in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature
The 25 Finalists for the 2025 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.
Across the five categories, nine writers have been previously honored by the National Book Foundation: Rabih Alameddine was a Finalist for Fiction in 2014 for An Unnecessary Woman; Megha Majumdar was Longlisted for Fiction in 2020 for A Burning; Karen Russell was a 2009 5 Under 35 honoree; Bryan Washington was a 2019 5 Under 35 honoree; Patricia Smith was a Finalist for Poetry in 2008 for Blood Dazzler; Solvej Balle was Longlisted for Translated Literature in 2024 for On the Calculation of Volume (Book I), translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland; Kyle Lukoff was a Finalist for Young People’s Literature in 2021 for Too Bright to See; Amber McBride was a Finalist for Young People’s Literature in 2021 for Me (Moth); and Ibi Zoboi was a Finalist for Young People’s Literature in 2017 for American Street. All of the Finalists for Nonfiction are first-time National Book Award honorees. Eight independent publishers and one university press are represented.
The 2025 Finalists will read from their work at the National Book Awards Finalist Reading on the evening of Tuesday, November 18 at NYU Skirball, an annual, in-person, ticketed event that is open to the public and livestreamed for readers everywhere. The Finalist Reading will be hosted by Michelle Zauner, bestselling author of Crying in H Mart, and the songwriter, musician, and lead vocalist of Japanese Breakfast. The Finalist Reading is presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and the NYU Creative Writing Program. Purchase in-person tickets and register for the livestream at NYU Skirball’s website.
On the morning of Tuesday, November 18, the Finalists in Young People’s Literature connect with middle and high school students for Teens Read the 2025 National Book Awards, hosted by Casey McQuiston, bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue and I Kissed Shara Wheeler. The in-person event, which will feature readings, Q&A, and book signings, will be held at Symphony Space in New York City. Teens Read will be livestreamed for students and educators across the country; and the first 25 public school educators to register will receive one set of the five Finalists for Young People’s Literature. For more information and to register for the livestream, please visit our website.
The Winners of the National Book Award for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature will be announced live on Wednesday, November 19 at the invitation-only 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The National Book Foundation will livestream the Ceremony for readers everywhere; register to watch on the Foundation’s website at nationalbook.org/awards. 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 also be presented as part of the evening’s ceremony: George Saunders, writer and professor, will be recognized with the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented by Deborah Treisman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker; and Roxane Gay, author and cultural critic, will receive the Foundation’s Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented by National Book Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson.
Publishers submitted a total of 1,835 books for this year’s National Book Awards: 434 in Fiction, 652 in Nonfiction, 285 in Poetry, 139 in Translated Literature, and 325 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.
2025 Finalists for Fiction:
Rabih Alameddine, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Karen Russell, The Antidote
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Ethan Rutherford, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
A Strange Object / Deep Vellum Publishing
Bryan Washington, Palaver
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Rabih Alameddine’s The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) tells the tale of a Lebanese family across six decades—from the Lebanese Civil War to the COVID-19 pandemic—with humor and heartbreak. Set over the course of one week in a near-future Kolkata devastated by food insecurity and climate change, Megha Majumdar’s novel A Guardian and a Thief asks how far we might be willing to go to protect those we love. Karen Russell’s The Antidote is set in a fictional Dust Bowl–era Nebraska town on the brink of collapse—bracing against the forces of the Great Depression and the community’s violent histories with Indigenous people and the land. Ethan Rutherford’s seafaring saga, North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, follows a ragtag crew embarking on a rescue mission and whaling journey that urges the cast of characters to scrutinize their own choices. In Palaver, Bryan Washington’s unnamed narrator is unceremoniously reunited with his estranged mother in Tokyo, and together, they revisit memories that span decades and borders, compelling them to understand and, ultimately, forgive one another.
2025 Finalists for Nonfiction:
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
Ecco / HarperCollins Publishers
Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Claudia Rowe, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
Abrams Press / Abrams
Jordan Thomas, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
In his debut work of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad centers his attention on American and European complicity in the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people, arguing that mass apathy towards immense suffering is leading to innumerable fractures across Western societies. Julia Ioffe returns to Russia nearly 20 years after her family fled the Soviet Union, blending reporting, history, and memoir to illustrate how the story of modern Russia is interwoven with stories of countless Soviet and Russian women in Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Yiyun Li’s memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow contends with the unimaginable loss of her two sons by suicide, while embracing radical acceptance—that both of her children chose death, and that she will continue to live despite the “abyss” in the aftermath. Claudia Rowe explores the American foster care system through interviews with current and former foster youth, psychologists, advocates, and judges, and calls for urgent reform in Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. Anthropologist and wildland firefighter Jordan Thomas blends ecology, federal forestry, and Indigenous history as he narrates a six-month megafire season in When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World, bringing readers to the front lines of the climate crisis.
2025 Finalists for Poetry:
Gabrielle Calvocoressi, The New Economy
Copper Canyon Press
Cathy Linh Che, Becoming Ghost
Washington Square Press / Simon & Schuster
Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth
Washington Square Press / Simon & Schuster
Richard Siken, I Do Know Some Things
Copper Canyon Press
Patricia Smith, The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Told through the point of view of an ungendered body as it ages, Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s collection The New Economy explores childhood memories, great loss, and the desire to accept and protect one’s own body as is, while simultaneously yearning to have been born in another. Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost recounts her estranged parents’ journey to the United States after escaping the Vietnam War as refugees, and later being cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—a 1979 film about the Vietnam War—in a reclamation that moves Vietnamese voices to the center of their own narrative. Tiana Clark’s collection Scorched Earth examines institutional and historical suffering, while simultaneously exploring sensuality and embracing radical self-love as a queer Black woman. Through the 77 autobiographical prose poems in I Do Know Some Things, Richard Siken writes his way through the aftermath of a stroke—recovering language, memories, and his sense of self in the process. The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems covers decades of Patricia Smith’s career, featuring new and previously uncollected poems deeply rooted in Black joy—in defiance of the centuries of violence committed against Black people in the United States.
2025 Finalists for Translated Literature:
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (Book III)
Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
New Directions Publishing
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, We Are Green and Trembling
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
New Directions Publishing
Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier
Translated from the Dutch by David McKay
New Vessel Press
Hamid Ismailov, We Computers: A Ghazal Novel
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Yale University Press
Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger
Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer
Seven Stories Press
Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, the third installment of Solvej Balle’s seven-part series, On the Calculation of Volume (Book III), offers readers a profound meditation on loneliness and the power of connection when protagonist Tara Selter learns that she is no longer alone in her endless November day. We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, is based on the real-life figure Antonio de Erauso, who was raised in a Basque convent and fled to the New World during the Spanish conquest, and examines gender identity, religion, and the intrinsic violence of colonialism. In Anjet Daanje’s The Remembered Soldier, translated from the Dutch by David McKay, amnesiac veteran Noon Merckem—found without any identifying information after World War I—is taken home from a psychiatric asylum by a woman who claims she is his wife, but the two are haunted by unreliable memories and the enduring traumas of war. In the late 1980s, French poet and psychologist Jon‑Perse becomes captivated with computers, wondering if this promising invention is capable of analyzing, translating, and creating literature in Hamid Ismailov’s We Computers: A Ghazal Novel, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega. Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, blends memoir and literary criticism, chronicling years of sexual abuse at the hands of Sinno’s stepfather, alongside a close reading of literary works that depict incest and pedophilia by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and others.
2025 Finalists for Young People’s Literature:
Kyle Lukoff, A World Worth Saving
Dial Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
Amber McBride, The Leaving Room
Feiwel & Friends / Macmillan Publishers
Daniel Nayeri, The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story
Levine Querido
Hannah V. Sawyerr, Truth Is
Amulet Books / Abrams
Ibi Zoboi, (S)Kin
Versify / HarperCollins Publishers
Kyle Lukoff blends Jewish mythology and adventure in A World Worth Saving to share the story of A, a trans teen who sets off on a journey to save his friend, dismantle a conversion therapy program, and use his voice to stand up against bigotry and transphobia. In Amber McBride’s novel-in-verse The Leaving Room, a Keeper named Gospel provides peaceful final moments for recently deceased young people, but is encouraged to push the boundaries of her Leaving Room when she falls in love with a fellow Keeper. Told through the eyes of orphaned siblings that become educators to nomadic tribes and, along the way, resolve to help a Jewish boy hiding from Nazi spies, Daniel Nayeri’s The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story uncovers a hidden World War II history and highlights the power of cross-cultural understanding. Hannah V. Sawyerr’s novel-in-verse Truth Is follows Truth Bangura, a 17-year-old poet who, after an abortion, finds community and freedom through her slam poetry team, her writing, and her post-graduation dreams. Ibi Zoboi’s novel-in-verse (S)Kin explores self-discovery, immigration, and colorism, through the perspectives of Marisol, the 15-year-old daughter of a soucouyant—or shape-shifting, skin-shedding witch—and Genevieve, the 17-year-old daughter of a college professor suffering from an unbearable skin condition.
