NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION PRESENTS: CELEBRATING THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD HONOREES FOR FICTION – FICTION

ANGELA FLOURNOY is the author of The Turner House: A Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection; an Indie Next pick; and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in New York.

ETHAN RUTHERFORD’s fiction has appeared in Bomb, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections – Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013) — and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Born in Seattle, he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota and has taught creative writing at Trinity College. 

JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of plays, essays, and short stories. His first novel, One Eye Red (Ett öga rött), received the Borås Tidning Award for best literary debut novel and became the bestselling paperback in Sweden of any category in 2004. His second novel, Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, received the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize, won Swedish Radio’s Award for best novel, and was nominated for the August Award. Upon its U.S. publication by Knopf, The New York Times Book Review dubbed the novel “wondrous.” In 2012, following a terrorist bombing in central Stockholm, he published the powerful short novel I Call My Brothers (Jag ringer mina bröder) to critical acclaim. Everything I Don’t Remember: A Novel (Allt jag inte minns), his greatly anticipated fourth novel, was published in 2015 and received the August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor. The Family Clause (Pappaklausulen) was published in the U.S. in 2020, longlisted for the Pen America Literary Awards, and chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award. His seventh book, The Sisters: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) became one of the bestselling novels of 2023 and was a finalist for the August Prize. His novels have been translated into more than 35 languages and he is the first Swedish writer to have a short story published in The New Yorker. He is also a celebrated playwright whose six plays have been performed by more than 100 international companies on stages from Stockholm and Berlin to New York and London. He was awarded a Village Voice Obie Award for his first play, Invasion!, which premiered in New York in 2011. In 2013, his open letter to the Swedish minister of justice in response to the controversial police project REVA, which was first published in Dagens Nyheter, rapidly became one of the most shared articles on social media in Swedish history. The article was later translated into more than a dozen languages and published in newspapers around the world, including The New York Times. In 2021, he moved to New York with his family to write a new novel as a Cullman fellow. He teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

KEVIN MOFFETT is the author of two short-story collections, as well as The Silent History, a narrative app for mobile devices. His work has been awarded the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Only Son (McSweeney's), was longlisted for the National Book Award. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, New York Times bestselling author MEGHA MAJUMDAR is a 2022 Whiting Award winner. Her novel A Burning was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was also named one of the best books of the year by various media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and Time. She holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

RUTH DICKEY has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art, now as executive director of the National Book Foundation. She previously had the pleasure of leading organizations in Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Seattle. An ardent fan of dogs and coffee, she served as a fiction judge for the 2019 National Book Awards. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and a B.S. in foreign service and M.A. in Latin American studies from Georgetown University. She is the author of the full-length collections Our Hollowness Sings and Mud Blooms, and the chapbook Paper Houses, Sky Ceilings.