Rabih Alameddine Wins National Book Award, Thanks Gastrointestinal Doctors

The National Book Awards’ 2025 fiction prize went to The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), by Rabih Alameddine, a novel about a lapsed writer living unhappily with his mom in Beirut. It is Alameddine’s ninth book. In his speech last night, the author thanked his publisher, independent booksellers, and writer friends like Amy Tan and Sara Schulman; he also thanked his psychiatrist, his drug dealers, and “all gastrointestinal doctors”: “I guarantee I would not have been able to write a single word in the last ten years without their help.”

The night’s nonfiction prize went to Omar El Akkad for One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a moral accounting of Israel’s atrocities in Palestine and the western world’s complicity. “It is difficult to think in celebratory terms about a book that was written in response to a genocide,” he said onstage. In the translated-literature category, winner Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, author of We Are Green and Trembling, said she would give her acceptance speech in Spanish because “there are fascists who don’t like it.”

New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman was there. Roxane Gay was there, receiving the Literarian Award, and Jeff Hiller hosted. Ellie the Elephant was also in attendance, doing an impressive book-reading mime routine on the red carpet. George Saunders, who was given a slightly premature lifetime-achievement award, thanked the people who have read his work but also “those of you who had planned to read it but never quite got around to it and even those of you who never had any intention of reading it but sometimes claimed that you already had.” Solvej Balle, whose On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) was nominated in the translated-literature category, did not attend, but her duo of translators, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, did. When Vulture asked them if there’s a writer they think more people should read, they answered simultaneously, “Solvej Balle.” You heard the translators: Get to it. The full list of winners, below.

Fiction
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), Rabih Alameddine

Nonfiction
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad

Poetry
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, Patricia Smith

Translated Literature
We Are Green and Trembling, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara; translated by Robin Myers

Young People’s Literature
The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story, Daniel Nayeri