Levithan and Duckels's THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES on the 2026 NBA longlist

We’re thrilled for David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels, whose oral history for young readers THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES: AIDS IN AMERICA (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2025) is longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature!

The news was announced this morning at The New Yorker online, with the following praise for the book from the category’s judges published on the National Book Foundation website:

“Through first-person interviews, poetry, essays, speeches, obituaries, artwork, and more, David Levithan and Gabriel Duckels capture the magnitude of the AIDS crisis in the United States for young readers. By threading together cultural and historical touchpoints, key figures, and medical milestones, The Fight of Our Lives: AIDS in America demonstrates the importance of youth activism to create social change.”

—2026 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature judges

The finalists for all five categories of the 2026 National Book Awards will be revealed October 6th, and winners will be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on November 18 in New York City.

See all of the finalists for this year’s National Book Award for Young People’s Literature here, and discover THE FIGHT OF OUR LIVES: AIDS IN AMERICA here.

Loubna Mrie and Daniyal Mueenuddin finalists for the 2026 Kirkus Prize

Enormous congratulations to Loubna Mrie and Daniyal Mueenuddin, whose books—Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria and This Is Where the Serpent Lives—are finalists for the 2026 Kirkus Prize, in the Nonfiction and Fiction categories, respectively!

In a statement, Kirkus Editor-in-Chief Tom Beer writes, “This year’s slate of prize finalists takes readers around the globe while exploring the deepest, most private recesses of the human mind, offering profound windows onto human experience.” We couldn’t agree more!

The Kirkus Prize honors the best of the year’s releases that have received a rare starred review from Kirkus before their publication and offers one of the highest rewards of US literary prizes. This year’s winners will be announced during a ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop in New York on Oct. 7 that will also be livestreamed on Kirkus’ YouTube channel at 7:30 p.m. EDT.

See the full list of finalists here, and discover Defiance by Loubna Mrie (Viking 2026) and This Is Where the Serpent Lives (Knopf 2026), available wherever books are sold!

Emma Cline's SWITZY longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize

Congratulations to Emma Cline, whose forthcoming novel SWITZY (Random House US, Chatto and Windus UK) is one of the “Booker Dozen”: the thirteen titles longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award.

The 2026 judges for the prize wrote the following about the novel:

“We live in a time ruled by overpowered and undersocialised wealthy boy kings; Emma Cline’s mordant novel considers what, if anything, remains at the end of one such luxurious yet lonely life. David is a retired American business executive with dementia who decides to be euthanised in a Swiss clinic. As he voyages across Europe, fuzzy memories from his life slip in and out of his consciousness. There are final gestures towards intimacy with family and friends, and a whimsical cartoon becomes a symbol of a bygone childhood. What makes a life? Cline writes vividly about the trappings of the elite – the private jets, the heirloom watches, all that time spent in the office – as well as their sad social cost in a story that feels immersive, elegiac, and very real. As one of us put it: ‘I travel a lot, and know these guys.’”

—2026 Booker Prize judges’ panel

The Booker shortlist will be announced September 22nd, before a November 9th ceremony names the award recipient.

Read more about the 2026 Booker Prize here, and discover Emma Cline’s SWITZY here.

Carys Davies's CLEAR wins France’s 2025 Prix du meilleur livre étranger

Milles félicitations à Carys Davies, the French edition of whose crystalline Clear has been awarded the Prix du meilleur livre étranger 2025 for fiction! Clear was published as Éclaircie by Éditions de la Table Ronde and translated by David Fauquemberg.

The prize was announced November 6th in a piece in Livres hebdo and awarded in a ceremony on December 4th at the Sofitel Paris which the author, currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Paris-based Institute for Ideas and Imagination, attended.

The Prix du meilleur livre étranger were founded in 1948 by a collective of publishers and editors. Every year a prize committee selects the best work of fiction and of non-fiction, respectively, from outside of the Francophone world that have been published in French that year.

See the official prize announcement here and discover the exquisite Clear in its US edition (Scribner, 2024) here.

Pauls Toutonghi awarded the 2025 Krisjans Barons Prize

Pauls Toutonghi, author of The Refugee Ocean and Dog Gone, has been awarded the 2025 Krisjans Barons Prize by the World Association of Free Latvians’ Cultural Foundation and Council (or, in the Latvian, PBLA KF&P), for his contributions as a Latvian-American author through books that “reflect the lives of immigrants, including the fates of Latvians.”

The PBLA prizes are given every November around the anniversary of the founding of the Latvian state and honor “those people who dedicate their time, energy, and resources to the preservation of Latvian identity and culture and the building of the nation's self-confidence.”

See more at the World Association of Free Latvians online, here, and learn more about The Refugee Ocean (Simon & Schuster, 2023) here and Dog Gone (Knopf, 2016) here.

Phillip B. Williams's OURS wins France’s 2025 Prix du premier roman étranger

Félicitations à Phillip B. Williams, the French edition of whose breathtaking Ours has been awarded the Prix du premier roman étranger 2025! Ours was published as Chez nous by Éditions Robert Laffont and translated by Charles Recoursé.

The prize was announced in a ceremony on October 21 and represents the selections of booksellers and a prize jury which reviewed all debut novels in French translation released in 2025.

Read more about the prize here and here, and discover the stunning Ours in its US edition (Viking, 2024) here.

David Szalay's FLESH wins the 2025 Booker Prize!

FLESH by David Szalay (Scribner US, Jonathan Cape UK) has won the 2025 Booker Prize!

The prize was presented at the 2025 Booker ceremony in London on November 10th, with Szalay receiving the statue from 2024 Booker laureate Samantha Harvey. In a news conference before the announcement, 2025 judges’ panel chair Roddy Doyle remarked of FLESH, “It’s just not like any other book. [The reader wants to] climb into the novel and be involved. I found it riveting.” The judges also hailed the novel as “extraordinary” and “singular.”

Discover David Szalay’s FLESH, published in the US by Scribner, here!

Mona Awad's WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY shortlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize

We’re very excited that We Love You, Bunny (Marysue Rucci Books US, Scribner Canada) by Mona Awad is one of five titles on the shortlist for the 2025 Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award!

The Giller Prize awards “the boldness, inventiveness, and transformational power of Canadian literature.” The judges of this year’s prize offered the following beautiful citation for We Love You, Bunny:

A delightfully deranged tale of rivalries, rabbits, murder, desperation and madness. We Love You, Bunny is an unhinged waltz through the corridors of creative academia, blending satire and surreal magical chaos as artistic creations stumble through the night with axes and fall in love, frat parties end in murder, and creative jealousies fuel uncanny powers. As hilarious as it is inventive, Awad’s novel is refreshingly original, bold in imagination and daring in its execution, asking us to consider: What do we owe to art, and what, if anything, does art owe us in return?

The ceremony honouring the 2025 Giller finalists and announcing the winner will take place on Monday, November 17, at 9 p.m. ET on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) TV in Canada and CBC’s YouTube channel.

See the full list of finalists here and discover We Love You, Bunny from Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster US here!

David Szalay's FLESH shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize

We’re thrilled that FLESH by David Szalay (Scribner US, Jonathan Cape UK) has been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize!

The novel is one of six finalists for the most prestigious literary prize in the UK, with Szalay a previous shortlister for his novel ALL THAT MAN IS. The Booker judges wrote the following about FLESH:

In many ways István is stereotypically masculine–physical, impulsive, barely on speaking terms with his own feelings (and for much of the novel barely speaking: he must rank among the more reticent characters in literature). But somehow, using only the sparest of prose, this hypnotically tense and compelling book becomes an astonishingly moving portrait of a man’s life.

—2025 Booker Judges

The 2025 Booker Prize will be awarded on November 10th at a ceremony in London. See the full Booker shortlist here, and discover David Szalay’s FLESH, published in the US by Scribner, here.

Caolinn Hughes a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award 2025

Congratulations to Caoilinn Hughes, whose short story “Two Hands,” published by The Paris Review, is a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award 2025!

The BBC National Short Story Award is one of the UK’s most prestigious short fiction prizes. Judges, all of whom are past winners and who read the stories blindly, selects the recipient from five finalists.
Each of this year’s shortlisted stories will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, with an abridged version of “Two Hands” airing the week of September 15th.

The winner will be revealed on September 30th on the BBC program, Front Row.