Carrie R. Moore Wins the 2026 Young Lions Fiction Award
There are books that make you feel someone knows you without ever having met you. When I learned that Carrie R. Moore had won the 2026 Young Lions Fiction Award at the New York Public Library for Make Your Way Home, the first thing I noticed was the title itself. There is something in that phrase that reached me before I had read a single page.
The Young Lions Award honors fiction writers aged 35 and under, and this year's jury — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Raven Leilani, and Alexander Sammartino — chose Moore from five finalists: Ariel Courage (Bad Nature), Kyle Edwards (Small Ceremonies), Harris Lahti (Foreclosure Gothic), and Stephanie Wambugu (Lonely Crowds). Ten thousand dollars and, worth more than the money, recognition from a city that still believes in literature as a civic act. The ceremony took place on June 16.
What draws me to Moore's work is not only the technical precision reviews describe — that economy of phrase that seems simple until you try to imitate it — but the insistence on return as a form of knowledge. Home not as nostalgia, but as territory that must be reconquered with adult eyes. I have known that feeling since García Márquez, since Ferrante, since Allende. And now, apparently, since Moore.
There is meaning in which jury chose this particular voice. Adjei-Brenyah built in Chain-Gang All-Stars a dystopian future where prison violence becomes spectacle, with a moral urgency that few writers sustain for four hundred pages. Raven Leilani revealed in Luster a voice without a safety net, naming things for what they are. That they now help find new voices says something about how great writers become anchors of a tradition.
Five finalists who together map the most alive American fiction of this moment. None of them over thirty-five. None of them has said their last word yet.
