Rabih Alameddine wins the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction

Rabih Alameddine has won the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), published by Grove Press. The winners were announced at the 76th National Book Awards ceremony in New York on 19 November 2025.

The novel centres on a philosophy teacher who lives with his ageing, sharp-tongued mother. The other fiction finalists were Megha Majumdar's A Guardian and a Thief, Karen Russell's The Antidote, Ethan Rutherford's North Sun and Bryan Washington's Palaver. The panel was chaired by Rumaan Alam.

The translated literature award went to Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's We Are Green and Trembling, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers (New Directions). Omar El Akkad won for non-fiction, Patricia Smith for poetry and Daniel Nayeri for young people's literature. The National Book Foundation said publishers had submitted 434 books in fiction, out of 1,835 across the five categories.

Why it matters: the submission figures give a sense of the odds. Fewer than one in eighty fiction entries reached the finalist stage, which is useful context for any writer or small publisher deciding whether a prize entry is worth the cost and effort.

Sources: National Book Foundation: winners of the 2025 National Book Awards; Literary Hub: winners of the National Book Awards.