Award Winners

Best National Book Award Fiction Winners — 12 Essential American Novels

The National Book Award for Fiction has been presented by the National Book Foundation since 1950, making it America's oldest major literary prize. It has a stronger record with formally ambitious and diverse fiction than the Pulitzer — Invisible Man won here in 1953; A Little Life was shortlisted in 2015. The NBA has given awards to Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Doctorow, DeLillo, and a generation of contemporary writers. These twelve are the essential winners and shortlistees.

Awarded since 1950

America's oldest literary prize

12 essential novels

The National Book Award: What to Know

The NBA is judged by a jury of five writers (rotating annually), which gives it more variability than the Pulitzer — different juries have radically different aesthetic preferences. This makes its record both more interesting and more inconsistent than the Pulitzer's. In any given year, the shortlist is a more reliable guide than the winner.
Unlike the Pulitzer, the NBA has no years where no award is given. It also awards Young People's Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Translated Literature — making it a broader literary prize. The fiction award is the most prestigious of the categories.
The NBA has a strong record with debut and early-career novelists: Flannery O'Connor won in 1960 with The Complete Stories; Denis Johnson won in 2007 with Tree of Smoke. The prize tends to reward ambition over accessibility, which sometimes produces excellent choices (Invisible Man) and occasionally bewildering ones.
The 2014 ceremony was disrupted when Sherman Alexie, the fiction chair, announced that the jury had shortlisted "the best books" — implying the winner (Phil Klay's Redeployment) was not the best — a breach of awards protocol that caused significant controversy and led to changes in jury guidelines.

The Landmark Novels

Pick #1

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison · 1953 · Winner

Black American identity Harlem The essential American novel

An unnamed Black narrator moves from the American South to New York in the 1930s–40s, constantly discovering that he is invisible — not literally, but socially: white America looks through him rather than at him. Ellison's novel is simultaneously a Bildungsroman, a political satire, and a work of formal innovation that incorporates jazz structure, surrealism, and the literary traditions of both Black America and European modernism. It won the National Book Award in 1953 and remains — alongside Beloved — the most important American novel about race in the twentieth century.

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Pick #2

Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner · 1972 · Winner

American West Family history Dual timeline

Lyman Ward, a historian confined to a wheelchair in the 1970s, reconstructs his grandparents' lives in the American West of the 1880s and 90s from letters and diaries. Stegner's novel — one of the great American novels and scandalously under-read — explores the gap between what people aspire to and what they settle for, and how the West was both an idea and a disappointment. The "angle of repose" is the geological term for the steepest angle at which a material can remain stable before sliding — a metaphor for the characters' marriages and illusions. A novel of profound patience and intelligence.

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Pick #3

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen · 2001 · Winner

American family Millennium Great American Novel

The Lambert family of St. Jude, a fictional Midwestern city: Alfred, the patriarch, is losing himself to Parkinson's and dementia. His wife Enid wants one last perfect Christmas. Their three adult children are variously falling apart in New York, Philadelphia, and on a cruise ship. Franzen's novel won the National Book Award in 2001 and became one of the most discussed American novels of the century — partly for its quality and partly for the spectacle of its author's public resistance to Oprah's Book Club selection. It is a very good novel about what American middle-class families do to each other, and a superb novel about illness.

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Pick #4

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 2009 · Winner (also Pulitzer)

Maine Linked stories NBA & Pulitzer

Thirteen linked stories set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine, with the difficult, unsentimental retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge at their centre. Strout's book is technically a short story collection but reads as a novel — Olive appears in every story, sometimes as protagonist, sometimes as a peripheral figure whose presence reframes another character's life. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009 and introduced a generation of readers to Strout's spare, devastating prose. The sequel, Olive, Again (2019), continues the character's story with equal quality.

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Modern Winners (2008–2018)

Pick #5

Let the Great World Spin

Colum McCann · 2009 · Winner

New York 1974 Philippe Petit's walk Polyphonic

On August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers on a tightrope. McCann's novel uses this event as a gravitational centre around which a dozen New York lives orbit — an Irish monk, a prostitute in the Bronx, a grieving Vietnam war widow in the Upper East Side, a hacker, a judge. The novel demonstrates that formally ambitious literary fiction can be emotionally overwhelming. McCann is Irish, and his outsider's love for New York gives the novel its particular quality: a city made new by someone arriving without habit.

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Pick #6

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 2016 · Winner

Vietnam War Double agent Pulitzer & NBA

A communist double agent embedded in the South Vietnamese army flees to Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon and continues his intelligence work among the refugee community. Nguyen's novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award — rare — and is the Vietnam War novel that America needed but had never received from a Vietnamese perspective. The narrator's sardonic intelligence makes the novel compulsively readable despite its political density. Nguyen's follow-up, The Committed (2021), continues the story in Paris.

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Pick #7

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 2015 · Shortlisted

Shortlisted Trauma Male friendship

Four friends graduate from a New England university and move to New York. One of them — Jude — carries a history of abuse so extensive it gradually obliterates the narrative. At 700+ pages, Yanagihara's novel is the most divisive literary novel of the 2010s: condemned by some critics as trauma pornography and acclaimed by others as the most emotionally devastating novel of the century. Shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Booker Prize in 2015. Whatever its faults, it is one of the most fully committed acts of novelistic empathy in recent fiction.

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Recent Winners (2019–present)

Pick #8

The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead · 2020 · Winner (also Pulitzer)

Reform school Jim Crow Florida Pulitzer & NBA

Based on the Dozier School for Boys — a real Florida reform school where hundreds of Black boys were abused and killed over decades — Whitehead's novel follows two boys navigating its brutality in the early 1960s. At 212 pages it is his shortest novel and his most precise: every sentence has been stripped to its essential weight. Whitehead won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for this novel and The Underground Railroad — making him one of the few American writers to win the Pulitzer twice for fiction.

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Pick #9

Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu · 2020 · Winner

Screenplay format Asian American identity Experimental

Written entirely in screenplay format, Interior Chinatown follows Willis Wu, an Asian American actor who has spent his career as a background extra — "Generic Asian Man" — in a cop procedural called Black and White. The form is the argument: Asian Americans are extras in the American story, literally written in the margins. Yu's novel is funny, formally daring, and politically exact. It won the National Book Award in 2020 and is the most formally inventive winner in years — demonstrating that the prize will reward structure as well as subject.

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Pick #10

Trust

Hernán Díaz · 2022 · Winner (also Pulitzer)

Gilded Age New York Four narratives Pulitzer & NBA

Four different versions of the same story: a 1920s novel about a Wall Street tycoon and his brilliant wife; a memoir by the tycoon; an unfinished autobiography by the wife; and a young woman's diary. Each version revises the one before it, raising questions about who controls historical narrative and whose version of a life gets preserved. Díaz won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 2022–23 — a rare double for a formally experimental novel. Trust is the best literary puzzle novel since Fingersmith.

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Pick #11

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 2017 · Winner (also Pulitzer)

Slavery Alternate history Pulitzer & NBA double

Cora escapes a Georgia plantation via the Underground Railroad — here reimagined as a literal steam railroad with tracks, tunnels, and stations, each state presenting a different variant of American racial terror. Whitehead's speculative conceit allows him to map the full geography of American racism across history, not just its antebellum form. Won the Pulitzer and National Book Award simultaneously — one of the few novels to achieve this. The novel that established Whitehead as the pre-eminent American novelist of his generation.

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Pick #12

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · 2011 · Winner (also Pulitzer)

Music industry Non-linear Pulitzer & NBA double

Thirteen interconnected stories following the music industry and its peripheral people across several decades, told in formats including a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's formal playfulness is entirely in service of her subject: time is the goon squad, and it comes for everyone. Won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. One of the most genuinely enjoyable Pulitzer/NBA novels — it is accessible, entertaining, and formally interesting in equal measure.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How does the National Book Award differ from the Pulitzer Prize?

The key differences: the NBA is judged by a rotating jury of writers (5 per year), giving it more variability; the Pulitzer is judged by journalists and critics and overseen by a board that can override the jury. The NBA is generally more willing to reward formally experimental fiction — Interior Chinatown (screenplay format), A Visit from the Goon Squad (PowerPoint chapter) — while the Pulitzer has historically favoured accessible literary fiction. The NBA shortlist is announced publicly months before the winner; the Pulitzer shortlist is not. Both prizes are solely for American fiction; the NBA also awards translation, poetry, young people's literature, and nonfiction.

Which National Book Award winner should I read first?

Olive Kitteridge (Strout) is the most accessible and immediately rewarding — the linked story format means you can sample it, and its emotional precision is remarkable. Let the Great World Spin (McCann) is the most propulsive. The Nickel Boys (Whitehead) is the shortest and most intense. A Visit from the Goon Squad is the most fun. Save Invisible Man and Angle of Repose for when you've built some foundation in American literary fiction — both reward readers who arrive with patience.