Samar Yazbek, Karim Kattan on National Book Award Longlist
SEPTEMBER 16, 2026 — Yesterday, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Among the ten titles were Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza, in Leri Price’s translation, and Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn, as translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman.
While this is a first for the Kattan-Zuckerman pairing, Yazbek and Price were finalists for the award in 2021, for Planet of Clay, and in 2024, for Where the Wind Calls Home.
Price was also a finalist in 2019, for her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work and on the longlist in 2023 for Khalifa’s No One Prayed Over Their Graves by Khaled Khalifa.
The ten titles on this year’s Translated Literature Longlist were originally published in seven different languages. In addition to Arabic and French, there were also titles translated from Chinese, Indonesian, Norwegian, Russian, and Spanish. According to organizers, judges read through 159 submissions for this year’s prize. The chair of this year’s judges is Christopher Merrill, who is joined by Shelley Fairweather-Vega, Javier García del Moral, John Keene, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.
The complete longlist:
Egana Djabbarova, My Dreadful Body
Translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden
New Vessel Press
Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender
Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Karim Kattan, Eden at Dawn
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Restless Books
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House
Ping Lu, To the East of the East
Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
World Editions
Vicente Luis Mora, Centroeuropa
Translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery
Bellevue Literary Press
Intan Paramaditha, Night of a Thousand Hells
Translated from the Indonesian by Stephen Epstein and Tiffany Tsao
Europa Editions
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Pure Men
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Other Press
Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act
Translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
New Directions Publishing
Samar Yazbek, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza
Translated from the Arabic by Leri Price
Other Press
This year’s finalists — in five different categories — will be announced on Tuesday, October 6, and winners will be announced on Wednesday, November 18, 2026.
Also read:
Samar Yazbek and Leri Price
Memories of Diminishment: A Review by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
Samar Yazbek on Redefining Collective Memory
Translating Trauma, the Trauma of Translating: In Conversation with Leri Price
An excerpt: Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life
Karim Kattan and Jeffrey Zuckerman
New Fiction: From ‘The Palace on the Higher Hill’ (by Karim Kattan, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman)