National Book Award finalists announced: Alameddine, Majumdar, Li and Russell are among the nominees

NEW YORK (AP) — Fiction by Rabih Alameddine, Megha Majumdar and Karen Russell and a memoir of family tragedy by Yiyun Li are among this year’s finalists for the National Book Award.

On Tuesday, the National Book Foundation a nnounced five nominees in each of five competitive categories, narrowing long lists of 10 unveiled last month. Winners, each of whom receive $10,000, will be revealed during a Nov. 19 dinner gala in downtown Manhattan. Honorary awards will be presented to fiction writer George Saunders and author-publisher Roxane Gay.

Majumdar is a fiction finalist for “A Guardian and a Thief,” her first novel since her celebrated debut, “A Burning,” came out in 2020. Other fiction nominees include Alameddine’s “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)”; Russell’s “The Antidote,” her first novel since “Swamplandia!,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2012; Ethan Rutherford’s “North Sun” and Bryan Washington’s “Palaver.”

The fiction authors set their work everywhere from India in the near future (Majumdar) to 1930s Nebraska (Russell) to contemporary Tokyo (Washington).

Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” a blunt and searching account of losing her two sons to suicide, is a nonfiction finalist, along with Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This”; Julia Ioffe’s feminist history of Russia, “Motherland”; Claudia Rowe’s “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care”; and Jordan Thomas’ “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World.”

The poetry nominees are Cathy Linh Che’s “Becoming Ghost,” Tiana Clark’s “Scorched Earth,” Richard Siken’s “I Do Know Some Things,” Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems” and Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “The New Economy.”

In translated literature, Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume (Book III),” translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell; and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s “We Are Green and Trembling,” translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, are among the finalists. The others include Anjet Daanje’s “The Remembered Soldier,” translated from the Dutch by David McKay; Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers: A Ghazal Novel,” translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; and Neige Sinno’s “Sad Tiger,” translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer.

Finalists for young people’s literature include three novels-in-verse: Amber McBride’s “The Leaving Room,” Hannah V. Sawyerr’s “Truth Is” and Ibi Zoboi’s “(S)Kin.” The other nominees are Kyle Lukoff’s “A World Worth Saving” and Daniel Nayeri’s “The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story.”

The National Book Awards, now in their 76th year, are chosen by panels of writers, critics and other members of the literary community. Notable works from 2025 that were not on the finalist lists include such novels as Angela Flournoy’s “The Wilderness” and Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” and Arundhati Roy’s memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me.”