Reading List · Literary Prizes
Eighty-three books have won the National Book Award for Fiction since 1950, which is more books than years, because for a while the judges were allowed to split it and for four years in the eighties there was a hardcover winner and a paperback winner. This year’s fifty longlisted books were named in September and the twenty-five finalists on 6 October. Below is every fiction winner since the beginning, the ten still worth your evening, and what actually happens between now and the ceremony in November.
By Lisanne Swart · 83 fiction winners, 1950 to 2025 · Five categories, 10,000 dollars each · Last reviewed 6 October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book. Every fiction winner since 1950 is in the table further down.
Fifty books were longlisted in September, ten in each of the five categories. On 6 October that narrowed to twenty-five finalists, five per category — the five for fiction are below. The winners follow on 18 November. 1
Quick answer
The National Book Award is given every year by the National Book Foundation in five categories — Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Young People’s Literature and Translated Literature. The winner in each gets 10,000 dollars and a bronze sculpture. Rabih Alameddine took the 2025 fiction award; the 2026 finalists were named on 6 October and the winners follow on 18 November. Eighty-three books have won the fiction award since 1950, and the rest of this page is about which of them are still worth reading.
How this page chooses
Eighty-three winners is too many to recommend honestly, so this page does two separate things. The full list of all eighty-three is in the table, with the facts and nothing else.
Eleven get proper notes: the 2025 winner, because it is the one still being argued about, and ten that lasted. “Lasted” is checkable rather than a matter of taste — still in print in more than one edition, still set on courses, still turning up on retrospective lists, still being filmed. It is not the same as “best”, and I have not read all eighty-three. Where a book below has an author guide on this site, that link is mine and says so.
Finalists · announced 6 October 2026
Five novels are still in it. Louise Erdrich, who won in 2012, and Marlon James were both on the September longlist and are not. I have not read all five yet, so there are no notes from me here — just what each book is about, and where it stands. 1314
A Palestinian man who fled his village in 1948 as a boy tells his life from his deathbed: Kuwait, Italy, the United States, and the house he never got back. The decades arrive out of order, the way a dying man would remember them.
Assadi was one of the Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees in 2018.
Magnolia sells houses in Miami. She has survived a mass shooting and cannot find a way to tell her own family, and the novel follows that silence from Florida back to Haiti.
Danticat was a fiction finalist once before, in 1995, and a nonfiction finalist in 2007.
Bogotá in the 1990s. The mother has died, and a father and his teenage daughter, Valentina, are left with each other — and with what he has never told her about his own past, out in the city’s queer underground.
A mother and her teenage daughter drive across Sicily after a divorce, with a grandmother who is starting to forget things and an ancient object that may be cursed in the back of the car.
Luiselli was a 5 Under 35 honoree in 2014.
A cabin in rural Florida, a trans health-care worker newly diagnosed with autism, their partner Liam — and, cut into the middle of it, chapters of a fantasy story posted online.
The only debut novel among the five.
Five each in nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Open a category to see them.
The five finalists
The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
Colin Asher
Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming
Abdelrahman ElGendy
Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom
Camonghne Felix
Mother Tongue
Sara Nović
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
Joseph Osmundson
The five finalists
Tree of Knowledge
Victoria Chang
Hide
Carolina Ebeid
Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation
Brenda Hillman
Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza
Fady Joudah
Bramble
Susan Stewart
The five finalists
The School of Night
Karl Ove Knausgaard · translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Centroeuropa
Vicente Luis Mora · translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery
Night of a Thousand Hells
Intan Paramaditha · translated from Indonesian by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao
Pure Men
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr · translated from French by Lara Vergnaud
Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza
Samar Yazbek · translated from Arabic by Leri Price
The five finalists
Holloway
Elana K. Arnold
When Tomorrow Burns
Tae Keller
That Which Feeds Us: A Hawaiian Gothic
Keala Kendall
The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America
David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels
Shook
Julian Randall
Raja is sixty-three, teaches philosophy in Beirut, and still lives with his mother, who is in her eighties and has a view on everything he does, including his silences. An invitation to an American writing residency arrives and looks like a door out — out of the flat, out of a country that has had a civil war, a currency collapse and a port explosion inside one lifetime. What he walks through instead is six decades of both, told in a voice that keeps stopping itself to correct the record.
Read it ifyou want a narrator who argues with his own story while he is telling it, and you can take a comic novel that has a war running underneath it.
In the order they won, not in order of how good they are. What they have in common is that people are still buying them.
A man is living in a cellar he has wired with one thousand three hundred and sixty-nine light bulbs, running on stolen electricity, and he is telling you how he got there. Between that cellar and a Southern college there is a paint factory, a riot in Harlem, and a series of men who each explain to him what he is for.
Read it ifyou want the American novel that most other American novels are arguing with.
London, the last winter of the war. A V-2 rocket is already in the air, and an American lieutenant turns out to have a private map of where the next one will land. Pynchon did not come to collect the award; he sent the comedian Irwin Corey, who gave a speech nobody could follow. The Pulitzer jury chose the same book unanimously that year and the board overruled them, so 1974 has no Pulitzer for fiction at all.
Read it ifyou have six weeks and want to spend them inside one book.
Jenny Fields wants a child and does not want a husband, and she solves that in a wartime hospital ward. Her son grows up to wrestle, to write, and to keep colliding with sudden violence in a book that is funny for pages at a time and then is not.
Read it ifyou like a novel that makes you laugh and then charges you for it.
Letters, from a girl in rural Georgia to God, because she has been told there is nobody else she may tell. Over thirty years the letters change hands, change addressee, and change what she is able to say in them. It took the National Book Award and the Pulitzer in the same year.
Read it ifyou want to see a voice grow up on the page, sentence by sentence.
Jack Gladney runs the Hitler Studies department at a small college and cannot speak German. Then a chemical spill puts a black cloud over the town, and the radio keeps renaming it as the day goes on. The supermarket is where everyone goes to feel better.
Read it ifyou want the novel that saw the twenty-first century coming from 1985.
Texas, 1949. The ranch has been sold, so two sixteen-year-olds get on their horses and ride south into Mexico for work. There are no quotation marks around anything anybody says, and the Spanish is not translated for you.
Read it ifyou want McCarthy at his most readable, before the worst of the dark.
Quoyle is a third-rate newspaperman whose wife dies badly, so he takes his two daughters to the Newfoundland house his family left generations ago. His job at the local paper is car wrecks and the shipping news. Every chapter is named after a knot.
Read it ifyou want weather, salt and a man being slowly put back together.
Kansas, 1856. John Brown frees a boy called Henry, mistakes him for a girl, and calls him Onion. Correcting the man seems more dangerous than the war, so Henry does not, and stays Onion for four years, all the way to Harpers Ferry.
Read it ifyou want the funniest book anyone has written about the American Civil War.
Cora runs from a cotton plantation in Georgia and finds that the underground railroad is an actual railroad — tunnels, engineers, a timetable — and that each state she surfaces in has invented a different answer to the same question.
Read it ifyou want history rebuilt as a machine you can walk through.
The same raft, the same river, told from the other end of it. Jim can read, writes at night, and keeps two ways of speaking: one he uses with white people, and one he uses when they are not there. Huck is still on board, and knows almost none of this.
Read it ifyou have read Huckleberry Finn, and also if you have not.
Fiction gets the attention, but four more awards are handed out the same night, and the translated and the young-readers winners in particular tend to go straight past most reading lists. 2
A book-length essay out of twenty years of reporting — Guantánamo, Ferguson, the Arab Spring, the refugee routes — that narrows onto Gaza. The title is the argument: that people will one day say they were against it, and were not.
Forty years of work in one volume, from a four-time national poetry slam champion who writes the sonnet and the blues with the same hand. Chicago, the Great Migration, and her father’s voice run through all of it.
Originally Las niñas del naranjel. Antonio de Erauso — the Basque soldier born Catalina, who left a convent at fifteen and spent a life in the Spanish colonies as a man — is old, lost in the jungle, writing a letter to an aunt and looking after two Indigenous girls. The Spanish is braided with Guaraní.
Iran, 1941, under Allied occupation. Babak picks up his dead father’s blackboard and his father’s job, teaching the nomadic Bakhtiari as they move, because it is the only way to keep his sister with him. In the Zagros Mountains they meet a Jewish boy who is hiding from a Nazi spy.
Eighty-three books in seventy-six years. The eleven in red have notes above; four of the authors have a full guide on this site. Years with two winners are the shared awards of 1973 to 1975 and the hardcover/paperback split of 1980 to 1983. 56
| Year | Book | Author | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1950 | The Man with the Golden Arm | Nelson Algren | The first one |
| 1951 | Collected Stories of William Faulkner | William Faulkner | |
| 1952 | From Here to Eternity | James Jones | |
| 1953 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | His only novel published in his lifetime |
| 1954 | The Adventures of Augie March | Saul Bellow | First of his three |
| 1955 | A Fable | William Faulkner | His second; also took the Pulitzer |
| 1956 | Ten North Frederick | John O’Hara | |
| 1957 | The Field of Vision | Wright Morris | |
| 1958 | The Wapshot Chronicle | John Cheever | |
| 1959 | The Magic Barrel | Bernard Malamud | A story collection, not a novel |
| 1960 | Goodbye, Columbus | Philip Roth | His first book |
| 1961 | The Waters of Kronos | Conrad Richter | |
| 1962 | The Moviegoer | Walker Percy | A first novel from a small press |
| 1963 | Morte d’Urban | J. F. Powers | |
| 1964 | The Centaur | John Updike | |
| 1965 | Herzog | Saul Bellow | His second |
| 1966 | The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter | Katherine Anne Porter | Also took the Pulitzer, same year |
| 1967 | The Fixer | Bernard Malamud | His second; also took the Pulitzer |
| 1968 | The Eighth Day | Thornton Wilder | |
| 1969 | Steps | Jerzy Kosinski | |
| 1970 | them | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 1971 | Mr. Sammler’s Planet | Saul Bellow | His third, and nobody else has three |
| 1972 | The Complete Stories | Flannery O’Connor | Awarded after her death |
| 1973 | Chimera | John Barth | Shared award |
| 1973 | Augustus | John Williams | Shared award |
| 1974 | Gravity’s Rainbow | Thomas Pynchon | Shared award; he sent a comedian |
| 1974 | A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories | Isaac Bashevis Singer | Shared award |
| 1975 | Dog Soldiers | Robert Stone | Shared award |
| 1975 | The Hair of Harold Roux | Thomas Williams | Shared award |
| 1976 | JR | William Gaddis | Almost entirely unattributed dialogue |
| 1977 | The Spectator Bird | Wallace Stegner | |
| 1978 | Blood Tie | Mary Lee Settle | |
| 1979 | Going After Cacciato | Tim O’Brien | |
| 1980 | Sophie’s Choice | William Styron | Hardcover |
| 1980 | The World According to Garp | John Irving | Paperback |
| 1981 | Plains Song | Wright Morris | Hardcover; his second |
| 1981 | The Stories of John Cheever | John Cheever | Paperback; had taken the Pulitzer in 1979 |
| 1982 | Rabbit Is Rich | John Updike | Hardcover; also took the Pulitzer |
| 1982 | So Long, See You Tomorrow | William Maxwell | Paperback |
| 1983 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | Hardcover; also took the Pulitzer |
| 1983 | The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty | Eudora Welty | Paperback |
| 1984 | Victory Over Japan | Ellen Gilchrist | First year back to one winner |
| 1985 | White Noise | Don DeLillo | |
| 1986 | World’s Fair | E. L. Doctorow | |
| 1987 | Paco’s Story | Larry Heinemann | Beat Beloved; the name went back to National |
| 1988 | Paris Trout | Pete Dexter | |
| 1989 | Spartina | John Casey | |
| 1990 | Middle Passage | Charles Johnson | |
| 1991 | Mating | Norman Rush | |
| 1992 | All the Pretty Horses | Cormac McCarthy | Also the National Book Critics Circle Award |
| 1993 | The Shipping News | E. Annie Proulx | Also took the Pulitzer |
| 1994 | A Frolic of His Own | William Gaddis | His second |
| 1995 | Sabbath’s Theater | Philip Roth | His second, 35 years after the first |
| 1996 | Ship Fever and Other Stories | Andrea Barrett | |
| 1997 | Cold Mountain | Charles Frazier | A first novel |
| 1998 | Charming Billy | Alice McDermott | |
| 1999 | Waiting | Ha Jin | |
| 2000 | In America | Susan Sontag | |
| 2001 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | |
| 2002 | Three Junes | Julia Glass | A first novel |
| 2003 | The Great Fire | Shirley Hazzard | |
| 2004 | The News from Paraguay | Lily Tuck | |
| 2005 | Europe Central | William T. Vollmann | |
| 2006 | The Echo Maker | Richard Powers | |
| 2007 | Tree of Smoke | Denis Johnson | |
| 2008 | Shadow Country | Peter Matthiessen | The only writer with awards on both sides, fiction and nonfiction |
| 2009 | Let the Great World Spin | Colum McCann | |
| 2010 | Lord of Misrule | Jaimy Gordon | From a press of five people |
| 2011 | Salvage the Bones | Jesmyn Ward | |
| 2012 | The Round House | Louise Erdrich | |
| 2013 | The Good Lord Bird | James McBride | |
| 2014 | Redeployment | Phil Klay | A first book, written after Iraq |
| 2015 | Fortune Smiles | Adam Johnson | |
| 2016 | The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | Also took the Pulitzer |
| 2017 | Sing, Unburied, Sing | Jesmyn Ward | Her second; no other woman has two |
| 2018 | The Friend | Sigrid Nunez | |
| 2019 | Trust Exercise | Susan Choi | |
| 2020 | Interior Chinatown | Charles Yu | Written partly as a screenplay |
| 2021 | Hell of a Book | Jason Mott | |
| 2022 | The Rabbit Hutch | Tess Gunty | A first novel |
| 2023 | Blackouts | Justin Torres | |
| 2024 | James | Percival Everett | Also took the Pulitzer |
| 2025 | The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) | Rabih Alameddine | The most recent winner |
One prize, two names, and a few years when it tried to be the Oscars.
So a list that says “National Book Award winners” and a list that says “American Book Award winners” for those years are the same list under two names, and any list that shows one winner a year for 1980 to 1983 has quietly dropped four books. 4
Poetry was added in 1991, Young People’s Literature in 1996, and Translated Literature in 2018 — though a translation award had already existed once, from 1967 to 1983, and was dropped for thirty-five years. That is five categories now, and fifty longlisted books every September. 4
One writer has won on both sides of the house, and only one: Peter Matthiessen, for The Snow Leopard in 1979 — in a category then called Contemporary Thought, which no longer exists — and for Shadow Country in the fiction award of 2008. 10
10,000 dollars and a bronze sculpture. The other four finalists in each category get 1,000 dollars, a medal and a judges’ citation. When a translated book wins, the money is split equally between the author and the translator, which is not true of every translation prize. 1
Only publishers may enter books — authors cannot submit their own work — and the book has to be published in the United States within the eligibility year. Until March 2024 the author had to be a US citizen. The rule now is citizenship or a primary, long-term home in the United States, its territories or Tribal lands, which is a real change: it let in writers who had lived and published there for decades without a passport. Translated Literature has never had a citizenship rule for the author. 3
1,835 books were entered for the 2025 awards — 434 in Fiction, 652 in Nonfiction, 285 in Poetry, 139 in Translated Literature and 325 in Young People’s Literature. Fifty were longlisted, twenty-five became finalists, five won. 8
In 1974 Thomas Pynchon did not turn up to collect his share of the fiction award and sent the comedian Irwin Corey in his place, who gave an acceptance speech nobody in the room could follow. The same novel was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer fiction jury that year; the Pulitzer board overruled them and gave no fiction prize at all. 7
In 1987 the fiction award went to Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story over Toni Morrison’s Beloved. On 24 January 1988 forty-eight Black writers, activists and critics published a letter in The New York Times about the fact that Morrison had won neither the National Book Award nor the Pulitzer. That spring, Beloved took the Pulitzer. 5
A separate thing the Foundation runs, since 2006: five fiction writers under thirty-five whose first novel or story collection came out in the last five years. Publishers cannot enter anyone. Each honoree is chosen by one selector, and the selectors are past National Book Award winners, finalists, or previous honorees. It is the closest the Foundation gets to a tip. 12
Where to go next on this site:
Rabih Alameddine won for Fiction with The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). Omar El Akkad won Nonfiction for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Patricia Smith won Poetry for The Intentions of Thunder, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and her translator Robin Myers won Translated Literature for We Are Green and Trembling, and Daniel Nayeri won Young People’s Literature for The Teacher of Nomad Land. George Saunders received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters that night and Roxane Gay received the Literarian Award.
The five fiction finalists, announced on 6 October 2026, are Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Dèy by Edwidge Danticat, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You by Julián Delgado Lopera, Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli and Mad Eden by Morgan Thomas, the only debut among them. They were chosen from 451 fiction submissions. The winner is announced at the ceremony on Wednesday 18 November 2026.
The longlists were announced between Tuesday 15 September and Thursday 17 September 2026 — ten books in each of the five categories, fifty in total. The twenty-five finalists, five per category, are named on Tuesday 6 October. The winners are announced at the ceremony on Wednesday 18 November 2026.
Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Young People’s Literature and Translated Literature. Poetry was added in 1991, Young People’s Literature in 1996, and Translated Literature in 2018, although a translation award had existed once before, from 1967 to 1983.
Winners receive 10,000 dollars and a bronze sculpture. Each of the other four finalists in a category receives 1,000 dollars, a medal and a judges’ citation. For a translated book the money is split equally between the author and the translator.
Saul Bellow, three times: in 1954 for The Adventures of Augie March, in 1965 for Herzog and in 1971 for Mr. Sammler’s Planet. No other writer has won the fiction award three times. Jesmyn Ward is the only woman to have won it twice, in 2011 and 2017.
Not since March 2024. For Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature the rule is now that the author must either hold US citizenship or have their primary, long-term home in the United States, its territories or Tribal lands. Before that change, citizenship was required. Translated Literature has never had a citizenship requirement for the author.
Two different reasons. In 1973, 1974 and 1975 the judges split the award between two books; that has not been allowed since 1984. Then from 1980 to 1983, when the awards were briefly renamed the American Book Awards, most categories ran a hardcover and a paperback version, so there was a hardcover fiction winner and a paperback fiction winner every year.
The National Book Award is given by the National Book Foundation in five categories, judged by panels of writers, and books are entered by their publishers. The Pulitzer Prize is administered by Columbia University, covers journalism as well as books, and has no submission fee structure of the same kind. Nine books have taken both: A Fable, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, The Fixer, The Stories of John Cheever, Rabbit Is Rich, The Color Purple, The Shipping News, The Underground Railroad and James.
1,835 books were submitted for the 2025 awards: 434 in Fiction, 652 in Nonfiction, 285 in Poetry, 139 in Translated Literature and 325 in Young People’s Literature. Of those, fifty were longlisted, twenty-five became finalists and five won.
Facts last checked 6 October 2026. Every year from 1950 was cross-checked between the Foundation’s own records and a second source, and the shared and split years were checked against a third. Two things I have deliberately left out because I could not confirm them: who made the bronze sculpture the winners receive, which the Foundation does not document, and the page counts, because the standard editions disagree with each other. Dates are for the first US edition.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and I have not read all eighty-three.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Fifty books in September. Twenty-five in October. Five in November.”
— The whole National Book Award, in three numbers.
Eighty-three fiction winners is a reading list that would outlast most marriages. The newsletter goes out once a month with rather less than that, and only what is worth the time.
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