Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction
The ten contenders for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
Find the New Yorker announcement here.
The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 6 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 18, 2026. For more information and to register to watch the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
The 2026 Nonfiction Longlist includes emerging and established writers, and features works of criticism, reportage, memoir, science writing, and more. Nine of the authors on the 2026 Nonfiction Longlist are first-time National Book Award honorees, and one has been previously honored: Camonghne Felix, a Longlister for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Build Yourself a Boat.
This year’s Longlist includes Fellows from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mass MoCA, the McKnight Foundation, New America, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. The Longlisted authors have been previously honored by the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, National Magazine Award in Reporting, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, the Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press, and more. Their work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Believer, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Guernica, Harper’s Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Nation, Ploughshares, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, and Words Without Borders, among others.
Two Longlisters investigate language, art, and music as tools that can exploit or liberate depending on the power structures at play. Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom blends memoir, literary analysis, and political criticism as Camonghne Felix shares her experience coming of age in New York, learning about the Black radical literary traditions of Gwendolyn Brooks and Audre Lorde. The poet and activist reflects on her work in politics and argues that language can help us imagine and build a new form of governance outside of our current oppressive systems. In The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, Colin Asher paints the portrait of five 20th century musicians and the albums they created while in prison to show how policing and the criminal justice system has impacted music culture—and vice versa. Asher merges biography with musical analysis in this fierce indictment of the racism behind both the American prison system and the record industry.
Three Longlisted works explore the complexities of parenthood and caregiving in the 21st century, asking how we survive in an unstable world. Queer microbiologist Joseph Osmundson always dreamed of being pregnant, and when his best friend and her partner ask him to be the biological father and co-parent of their child, he accepts. A blend of memoir and science writing, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood grapples with bringing a child into a world experiencing climate change and political upheaval, and what it means to build a family beyond biology and across racial divides. Mother Tongue traces Sara Nović’s hearing loss as a child and finding her place in the deaf community alongside her experience of parenting of two young sons—one adopted and deaf, and one biological and hearing. In her debut memoir, Nović interrogates the history of discrimination against deaf and disabled communities in the United States, and the capacity to endure and build a family in the face of stigma and systemic oppression. Angela Pelster’s essay collection taps into humanity’s ability to adapt and evolve in the face of crises, personal and planetary. The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming chronicles the author’s experiences of surviving a tumultuous divorce, experiencing homelessness as a single mother, and navigating political and economic instability—all while remaining open to the beauty and possibility in the world and in ourselves.
Three 2026 Longlisters question the possibility of neutrality across race, class, and social divides, past and present. Zayd Ayers Dohrn writes of his childhood as the son of fugitive parents, both founding members of radical Vietnam War–era group the Weather Underground. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground is both a family memoir and a work of deep reporting that draws from interviews, declassified FBI files, letters, photos, and journals to tell a story of radical resistance and the often complex contradictions between personal and political values. Journalist Wil Haygood draws parallels between the Vietnam War—which disproportionally sent Black Americans to the front lines—and the civil rights movement in the United States. In The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home, Haygood chronicles the lives of seven Black soldiers who served in Vietnam, a biracial piano player, a groundbreaking Black reporter, and several other Black Americans, situating them alongside cultural and political moments that shaped the 1960s to today. At the core of Wendy S. Walters’s work of criticism is white paint—the default color that coats the spaces and structures surrounding us, and the supposedly “neutral” symbol of ordinary, clean, and even pure. By examining the role of white paint in art history, architecture, and Walters’s own life, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint makes the case that our decision—subconscious or not—to rely on white paint as the standard color reveals more about our personal and cultural psyches than we may realize.
Two Longlisted titles highlight personal experiences of violence situated within broader systems of oppression to reveal the material costs of dehumanization. Chronicling the lives of four families across eight decades, journalist Rozina Ali demonstrates how the War on Terror and post-9/11 scrutiny of Muslim communities across the United States was built on decades of mass surveillance, increased violence, and Islamophobia. Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America reveals the pervasiveness of anti-Islamic sentiment in US policies and politics; its direct, devastating impact on countless lives; and the media’s role in its normalization. Two years after the revolution that sparked hope for a free Egypt, teenage student activist Abdelrahman ElGendy and his father were arrested at a brutal police crackdown during a mass demonstration, to then spend six years contending with bureaucracy and corruption while in prison. Fortified by the Arab world’s most enduring revolution song, “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”—translated as “We Will Remain Here”—Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming is the story of political resistance, survival, and liberation in the face of authoritarianism.
Publishers submitted a total of 727 books for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The judges for Nonfiction are Eve L. Ewing, Audrey I-Wei Huang, Jonathan C. Slaght, Robert Warrior (Chair), and Lidia Yuknavitch. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.
2026 Longlist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction:
Rozina Ali, Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America
Crown / Penguin Random House
Colin Asher, The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
W. W. Norton & Company
Zayd Ayers Dohrn, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
W. W. Norton & Company
Abdelrahman ElGendy, Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming
Hogarth / Penguin Random House
Camonghne Felix, Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom
One World / Penguin Random House
Wil Haygood, The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Sara Nović, Mother Tongue
Random House / Penguin Random House
Joseph Osmundson, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
Bloomsbury Publishing
Angela Pelster, The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming
Milkweed Editions
Wendy S. Walters, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint
Scribner / Simon & Schuster