The National Book Awards 2026

The shortlists for this year’s National Book Awards have been announced in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.

The winners will be announced on November 18th at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony, which will be livestreamed for all to see. You can sign up to watch it for free by clicking here.

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Jane Green, author of The Many Private Lives of Missy Cooke

Missy Cooke’s parents divorced when she was young. While her mother did her best to make ends meet, her father devoted his life to work --- and his new family. Missy only knew him from afar. But when he came to visit, his light shone bright. He was Silicon Valley tech titan Marty Cooke. Now an adult, Missy’s life is a constant negotiation between her own desires and the towering expectations of her father. But when a devastating diagnosis forces Marty to step down from his tech empire, ipryy, he chooses Missy. Thrust into a world of high-stakes board meetings and cutthroat corporate politics, Missy is completely out of her depth. When she uncovers a dark secret that threatens to destroy everything her father built, she must decide what kind of leader she will become.

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Charles Spencer, author of Swan Song: Diana, my sister

In September 1997, Charles Spencer stood in Westminster Abbey before a watching world and shared his grief at losing his beloved sister, Diana. Now, nearly 30 years later, he tells the astonishing story of his life with Diana and the tragic week of her death. In childhood, Charles and Diana, the youngest Spencers, were inseparable. Yet everything changed when Diana married the Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and overnight became a global icon. Charles saw his older sister serve the world’s marginalized and relish being mother to her treasured sons. But, pursued by a barbaric press as her royal marriage crumbled, she was left desperately alone. Charles always tried to be there for Diana --- until that black night in August 1997.

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Robert Kolker, author of The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia

In Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college, only Barb was home to see their mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize. We learn that this family has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their 40s, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking, and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish --- and there is a 50-50 chance that it will happen to their children, too. THE VANISHING FAMILY unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them.

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Min Jin Lee, author of American Hagwon

The men, women and children in AMERICAN HAGWON struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children find their lives upended --- first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California --- where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures.

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