Finalists have been selected for the 2025 National Book Awards. The five category winners will be announced at the National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner in New York City on November 19. 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
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press)
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)
The Antidote by Karen Russell (Knopf)
North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum Publishing)
Palaver by Bryan Washington (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Nonfiction
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf)
Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (Ecco)
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care by Claudia Rowe (Abrams Press)
When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World by Jordan Thomas (Riverhead Books)
Poetry
The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Copper Canyon Press)
Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che (Washington Square Press)
Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark (Washington Square Press)
I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon Press)
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Scribner)
Translated Literature
On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions)
We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (New Directions)
The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated from the Dutch by David McKay (New Vessel Press)
We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega (Yale University Press)
Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer (Seven Stories Press)
Young People's Literature
A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff (Dial Books for Young Readers)
The Leaving Room by Amber McBride (Feiwel & Friends)
The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri (Levine Querido)
Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyerr (Amulet Books)
(S)Kin by Ibi Zoboi (Versify)
Two lifetime achievement awards will also be presented as part of the evening's ceremony: George Saunders 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 NBF's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented by National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson.