Here is the 2026 National Book Award Shortlist for Translated Literature

In September, the National Book Award judges announced their longlists in five categories, including Translated Literature. Today, they’ve shared the five books on the shortlist. The awards are presented in November at the National Book Award Ceremony and Dinner. Finalists each take home $1,000, while the winner in each category receives $10,000 and a bronze sculpture.Here are the five books on the shortlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature, along with what critics and authors are saying about them. The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken “Ingenious… Knausgaard masterfully charts his antihero’s ascending ambition and the encroaching forces that eventually snuff it out. It’s a remarkable addition to an exciting and disturbing series.” —Publishers Weekly “Riveting… This fourth novel in Knausgaard’s Morning Star sextet squarely inhabits the series’s prevailing mood: realism undercut by a hint of the preternatural.… In Martin Aitken’s translation, the prose is fluent and nimble, the imagery possessed of a steely melancholia.” —The Times Literary Supplement (UK) Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora, Translated from Sp...