#literary-awards

#literary-awards

Within days, however, one entry aroused suspicion. “The Serpent in the Grove,” a story by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad and Tobago, which had taken honors for the Caribbean region, struck a few people as bearing the stylistic tells of AI-generated text.

Addie Citchens reads her story 'The City Is a Graveyard,' from the March 16, 2026, issue of the magazine. Citchens is a Mississippi Delta-born, New Orleans-based writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, 'Dominion,' was published in 2025 and was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.

There's love, all the time beside me, its rolling tides polishing jagged moments with surprise apologies silly jokes extra snacks and the great luck of seeing a heart switch on the light that opens a locked-down face. There are landmarks: each person I've loved each one who loved me-quirky waves we've ridden together.

Out of the many hundreds of titles that our organization carefully considered this year, these singular and striking finalists rose to the top, NBCC President Adam Dalva said in a statement Tuesday. They interrogate the lives we lead, broaden our creative and social horizons, move us, and continually surprise us. Especially in this difficult time, every one of these writers and translators deserves to be celebrated - and to be widely read.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joan Silber reads her story " Safety," from the December 8, 2025, issue of the magazine. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, Silber is the author of nine books of fiction, the most recent of which are the novels " Mercy" and " Secrets of Happiness."

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro Panamanian American poet and playwright whose books include Stepmotherland, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and an International Latino Book Award, and Migrant Psalms, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

The press, then known as Holt, Rinehart and Winston, had taken a chance on the book, which had been rejected by numerous other houses. The initial print run was somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 units-modest expectations that looked justified when, in the first year, sales barely cleared 2,000. This despite getting positive reviews in the New York Times and The New Yorker and being assigned to freshman classes at the City College of New York.