Fiction.
The fiction prize is awarded for a single novel, novella, or story collection first published in the United States during the calendar year of the prize. It is the awards' oldest category, and — by tradition, though not by rule — the last read at the ceremony.
A book of fiction is defined, in the guidelines, as "any work in which the author is understood to be inventing the world of the sentences." The panel is instructed to disregard genre, market, format, page count, and the previous accolades of the writer. It is instructed only to say, over the course of forty weeks, whether the book has enlarged what an American novel can be.
The laureate,
and the four finalists.
The 2025 fiction jury read 402 books. On the evening of November 8, sequestered without staff at the Cooper Union, they wrote the citation below.
A Country
of Ghosts
A Country
of Ghosts.
A novel of migration written in the register of a hymn. Chen's Fujianese seamstress arrives in San Francisco with a suitcase of her mother's threads and, over the course of six decades, stitches an America the country did not know it had. The prose is at once unhurried and unrelenting — Chen writes as though she has been waiting a long time to say precisely this, precisely so — and yet the novel finds room for humor, for a brief cameo by a chess prodigy, for the smell of ginger through a laundry window. In its second half the book becomes a ghost story of a kind we have not seen in American fiction: not haunted, exactly, but attended— by the dead, by the unmade, by the country the seamstress kept meaning to become. A book that will be read for a hundred years.
The Salt
Roads
Small
Mercies
Antigua
at Noon
The Owl
House
Five readers,
seven hundred books.
Seated the eighth of January. They will read until the sixth of October. In February, they read together for the first time; in November, for the last.
Ten books
from a season of reading.
The longlist is chosen without ranking. It is a statement, in effect, that the panel found ten books of consequence in the year — no more, no less. Longlisted authors receive a stipend, and their books are stocked for the year in the founding libraries.
Every fiction laureate,
1981 to the present.
Selected below by decade. Each name links to the winning book's full citation and, where available, the author's remarks at the ceremony.
The 2020s.
The 2010s.
Have you read a novel
the country must not miss?
Any reader in the United States may nominate one book per category. About a seventh of the longlist arrives this way.