Awards season is upon us, and the National Book Award judges just released their 2025 shortlists across five categories. You may recall that longlists of 10 titles each began to roll out in September. Now the lists grow shorter in anticipation of the awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 19, when winners in each category will be announced. Finalists each take home $1,000, while the winner in each category received $10,000 and a bronze sculpture.

The Awards honor books written by U.S. authors for books published in the United States. The five categories include Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature.

Here’s the 2025 National Book Awards Shortlist for Fiction:

• The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
• A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
• The Antidote by Karen Russell
• North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford
• Palaver by Bryan Washington

Here’s the 2025 National Book Awards Shortlist for Nonfiction:

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
• Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe
• Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
• Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care by Claudia Row
• When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World by Jordan Thomas

Here’s the 2025 National Book Awards Shortlist for Poetry:

• The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
• Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che
• Scorched Earth by Tiana Clark
• I Do Know Some Things by Richard Silken
• The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith

Here’s the 2025 National Book Awards Shortlist for Translated Literature:

• On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russel
• We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
• The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated from Dutch by David McKay
• We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov, translated from Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
• Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from French by Natasha Lehrer
  

Here’s the 2025 National Book Awards Shortlist for Young People’s Literature:

• A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff
• The Leaving Room by Amber McBride
• The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri
• Truth Is by Hannah V. Sawyerr
• (S)Kin by Ibi Zoboi

The National Book Awards are among the most prestigious honors bestowed upon books in a given year. They began in 1936 by the American Booksellers Association, took a break during World War II, and then resumed under the leadership of several collaborating book industry organizations in 1950. A few decades later, the National Book Foundation took over, with the goal of ensuring these books are not only honored but that their impact is felt across the country in a real, meaningful way.

More information about the National Book Awards finalists is available on their website.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.