This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2026 National Book Awards, including Young People’s Literature, Translated Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction. To receive book recommendations from our writers and editors, plus short reviews of recent releases, sign up for our new What We’re Reading newsletter.
“The School of Night” is the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “Morning Star” series, which the author began writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The novels rifle through the history of thought and culture, tracing the paths existential unknowns have carved,” Joshua Rothman wrote in a column, considering the series in January. “The School of Night,” translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, is one of ten titles on this year’s longlist. The books on the list originally appeared in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, Indonesian, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish. Intan Paramaditha’s “Night of a Thousand Hells,” about a young woman who carries out a suicide bombing and that act’s effect on her family, is the first Indonesian translation to be honored by the National Book Awards.
The judges for the category this year are Shelley Fairweather-Vega, whose translation of Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2025; Javier García del Moral, the founder of the Wild Detectives, a bookstore and bar in Dallas, Texas; John Keene, whose book “Punks” won the National Book Award in Poetry in 2022; Christopher Merrill (Chair), a former director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and the author of “On the Road to Lviv” and “Flares”; and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, who received a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” award for her first novel, “Fra Keeler,” in 2012.
This year’s longlist includes fiction, nonfiction, novels in verse, and one picture book. Several titles on this year’s list explore the power of art and the written word; others feature supernatural encounters or voyages through space and time. Two of the authors on the longlist—Elana K. Arnold and David Levithan—have been nominated for the award before.
Julian Randall, “Shook” Henry Holt and Company (BYR) / Macmillan Publishers
朱利安·兰德尔，《震撼》，亨利·霍尔特公司（青少年书局）／麦克米伦出版社
Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, “Life on the Moon” Knopf Books for Young Readers / Penguin Random House
马修·斯旺森、罗比·贝尔，《月球上的生活》，克诺夫青少年书局／企鹅兰登书屋
The judges for the category this year are Edith Campbell, a founder of the We Are Kid Lit Collective; Brandy Colbert (Chair), the author of “Black Birds in the Sky”; Tricia Ebarvia, a co-founder of the Institute for Racial Equity in Literacy; Jarrett J. Krosoczka, whose graphic memoir “Hey, Kiddo” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018; and Anne Ursu, whose novel “The Real Boy” was long-listed for the National Book Award in 2013.
