2018 National Book Awards
Winners Announced

The National Book Foundation has chosen The Friend by Sigrid Nunez as the recipient of the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction. The book was selected from a pool of six finalists, which also included A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, Florida by Lauren Groff, Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, and The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. The winner was announced Sunday, November 4. 

Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are American literary prizes administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. A pantheon of writers such as William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker, E. Annie Proulx, Jesmyn Ward, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all won National Book Awards. Although other categories have been recognized in the past, the Awards currently honor the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature, published each year. See the winners for all categories at the National Book Foundation’s site.

Read more about our book club selection The Friend on our Books in the Bag page.