Leri Price and Samar Yazbek Finalists for National Book Award
Books by Abdelrahman ElGendy, Fady Joudah Also Shortlisted
OCTOBER 6, 2026 — Author Samar Yazbek and translator Leri Price made the five-book shortlist for the 2026 National Book Awards for Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza.
The shortlists — five in five categories — were announced today.
The team of Yazbek and Price have been finalists for a National Book Award twice before — in 2021 for Planet of Clay and in 2024 for Where the Wind Calls Home. Leri Price was also a finalist in 2019, with Khaled Khalifa, for Death Is Hard Work, and she was longlisted in 2023 as the translator of Khalifa’s No One Prayed Over Their Graves.
The other translation shortlistees are:
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
Penguin Press / Penguin Random House
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
Other notable shortlistees — for our audience — are Abdelrahman ElGendy’s Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming, which made the five-book nonfiction list and Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza, on the poetry shortlist.
Publishers submitted a total of 1,912 books for this year’s National Book Awards: 451 in Fiction, 727 in Nonfiction, 285 in Poetry, 159 in Translated Literature, and 290 in Young People’s Literature. Winners are set to be announced live at the 77th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 18, 2026.
Also read:
Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life: Voices of Survival and Witness in Gaza
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
Abdelrahman ElGendy’s Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming
How an Egyptian Prison Poem Came to Structure My Memoir
Fady Joudah’s Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza
Exhibit G: Baby Moses & Khalas
Fady Joudah’s Meditation on Language and Time Under Genocide