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.

Carys Davies's CLEAR the 2025 Wales Book of the Year in Fiction

Congratulations to Carys Davies, whose novel CLEAR (Scribner US and Granta Books) has been named the 2025 Wales Book of the Year in Fiction!

The Wales Book of the Year awards program, bestowed by Literature Wales, “plays an essential part in Literature Wales’ programme of activity and contributes to its strategic aim of celebrating and representing Wales’s writers, its heritage and rich literary culture. The prize offers an invaluable platform to both emerging and established writers.”

The judges’ panel wrote the following about Carys Davies’s CLEAR:

“We all loved this book, for its story, for its ambition, for its sentences, for its relevance to our world today. It is an intricately crafted, passionate and remarkable novel. Excellence is always the only criteria, in the end, for a prize, and that’s true for this winning book. Congratulations to Carys Davies, author of this year’s winning book, Clear.”

Learn more about the Wales Book of the Year awards here.

And learn more about Clear here.

Wally Lamb's THE RIVER IS WAITING an Oprah's Book Club selection

Congratulations to Wally Lamb, whose latest novel, THE RIVER IS WAITING, has been selected as part of Oprah’s Book Club!

The news was announced on June 10th on CBS Mornings, followed by an interview with Wally Lamb, Oprah, and the CBS Mornings anchors. See it here, and watch an extended conversation between Oprah and the author for The Oprah Podcast here.

The selection of THE RIVER IS WAITING marks Wally Lamb’s record-breaking third appearance on the Oprah’s Book Club list. (His novel SHE’S COME UNDONE was the book club’s very first selection, in 1997.)

See the official announcement page here, and discover THE RIVER IS WAITING, published by Marysue Rucci Books/Simon & Schuster, here.

Alexandra Fuller a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography

Congratulations to Alexandra Fuller, whose FI: A MEMOIR OF MY SON was one of three finalists for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography!

The Pulitzer committee deemed the memoir “[a]n elegiac meditation on motherhood and grief, written from the rage and pain of losing a child, but in a voice that ultimately resonates with beauty and hard-won acceptance.”

Find the full citation here, and discover FI, published by Grove Press, here.