The 2025 National Book Awards Longlist

The judges for the category this year are the poet and activist Heather Kathleen Moody Hall, proprietor of Green Feather Book Company; Tiya Miles, a history professor at Harvard whose book, “All That She Carried,” won the 2021 National Book Award; the journalist and filmmaker Raj Patel, author of “Stuffed and Starved”; Cristina Rivera Garza, a professor at the University of Houston whose 2024 book “Liliana’s Invincible Summer” won the Pulitzer Prize; and the New York Times reporter Eli Saslow, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and 2023.

Poetry

This year, The New Yorker published poems from six of the ten poetry collections that appear on this year’s longlist: “Piano Lesson,” by Richard Siken; “True Apothecary,” by Natalie Shapero; “Maybe in Another Life,” by Tiana Clark; “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern,” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi; “70,” by Patricia Smith; and an excerpt of “Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans,” by Rickey Laurentiis. Nine of the nominees are being honored by the National Book Awards for the first time; Smith, long-listed this year for “The Intentions of Thunder,” was a finalist in 2008.

Gbenga Adesina, “Death Does Not End at the Sea”
University of Nebraska

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “The New Economy”
Copper Canyon

Cathy Linh Che, “Becoming Ghost”
Washington Square / Simon & Schuster

Tiana Clark, “Scorched Earth”
Washington Square / Simon & Schuster

Rickey Laurentiis, “Death of the First Idea”
Knopf / Penguin Random House

Esther Lin, “Cold Thief Place”
Alice James Books

Natalie Shapero, “Stay Dead”
Copper Canyon

Richard Siken, “I Do Know Some Things”
Copper Canyon

Patricia Smith, “The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems”
Scribner / Simon & Schuster

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, “Terror Counter”
Deep Vellum

The judges for the category this year are Kate Daniels, author of the recent poetry collection “In the Months of My Son’s Recovery”; Terrance Hayes, whose collection “Lighthead” won the 2010 National Book Award; H. Melt, author of “There Are Trans People Here”; Anis Mojgani, who recently served as Oregon’s tenth poet laureate; and Caridad Moro-Gronlier, author of “Tortillera.”

Translated Literature

In March, Alice Gregory reviewed Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection”—an Italian-language novel about the beautiful, aimless life of an expat millennial couple in Berlin, which reimagines Georges Perec’s début “Things: A Story of the Sixties” (1965) in the twenty-tens. “Perfection,” translated into English by Sophie Hughes, is one of ten titles on this year’s longlist. The books on the list originally appeared in nine languages: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Uzbek. Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers: A Ghazal Novel,” about a French poet who devises an A.I. program to replicate Persian poetry, is the first Uzbek translation to be honored by the National Book Awards.

Solvej Balle, “On the Calculation of Volume (Book III)”
Translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
New Directions

Jazmina Barrera, “The Queen of Swords”
Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Two Lines

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, “We Are Green and Trembling”
Translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
New Directions

Anjet Daanje, “The Remembered Soldier”
Translated from the Dutch by David McKay
New Vessel

Saou Ichikawa, “Hunchback”
Translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton
Hogarth / Penguin Random House

Hamid Ismailov, “We Computers: A Ghazal Novel”
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Yale

Han Kang, “We Do Not Part”
Translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
Hogarth / Penguin Random House

Mohamed Kheir, “Sleep Phase”
Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Two Lines

Vincenzo Latronico, “Perfection”
Translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes
New York Review Books

Neige Sinno, “Sad Tiger”
Translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer
Seven Stories