Bryan Washington and Omar El Akkad are among the US National Book Awards 2025 finalists announced in New York on Tuesday, October 7, 2025.
The US National Book Awards are literary awards from the Northern American nation’s National Book Foundation, established in 1936. They are conferred on fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature. Some of the previous winners have been Les Payne, Tamara Payne, Kacen Callender, Tiya Miles, and Jason Mott. W Paul Coates and Percival Everett won in 2024.
The 2025 longlists were announced in September, before the finalists were made public on October 7. The writers of African descent who made it to the finalist lists are;
Fiction
Jury: Rumaan Alam (Chair), Debra Magpie Earling, Attica Locke, Elizabeth McCracken, and Cody Morrison.
- Palaver, Bryan Washington, Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Nonfiction
Jury: Tiya Miles (Chair), Heather Kathleen Moody Hall, Raj Patel, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Eli Saslow
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, Knopf / Penguin Random House
Bryan Washington responded on social media with the statement, “Palaver is a finalist for this year’s @nationalbookfoundation award for Fiction and I’m very grateful 🚃 Grateful to @fsgbooks and @dani_bukie for supporting me and my work. Grateful to everyone who’s trusted the book with their time. V grateful to be in conversation with so many great books as finalists 🍡 This book would not be possible without my friends and found fam, and it was written with people I hold dear in mind. PALAVER will be released in a few weeks from @fsgbooks 🛴 Thank you for your support 🍩🚟”
The winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York, USA, on November 19, 2025.
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