Winners of 2025 National Book Awards Announced

Erkiulis
3 hours ago
2 min read

Following the Booker Prize 2025 winner announcement, last night American literary world named their own winners of 2025 National Books Awards.

The National Book Award for Fiction went to Rabih Alameddine's The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). The novel dances across six decades to tell the story of a singular life and its absurdities - a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness.

In a tiny Beirut apartment, 63-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned. When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.

The National Book Award for Nonfiction was handed to Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, for Poetry - to Patricia Smith's The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, for Translated Literature - to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling , and for Young People's Literature - to Daniel Nayeri's The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story.