The 2026 Guggenheim Fellows: Thirty-Five Unfinished Directions
The Guggenheim Fellowship has always been less about the money — though the money helps — and more about the signal. To receive one is to have the foundation say, quietly but firmly: we believe in the work you have not yet finished. This year’s literary class, announced last week, includes 35 writers across fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. The list is, as these things go, both reassuring and surprising.
Among the prose fellows, two names anchor the selection with the weight of decades: Amitav Ghosh, whose Ibis Trilogy remains one of the most ambitious historical undertakings in contemporary fiction, and Marlon James, whose Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings redrew the map of what a novel could contain. Both are mid-career writers — if one can use that term for artists whose careers already span continents and genres — and the fellowship suggests that whatever they are working on next, it will matter.
Namwali Serpell is there too, the Zambian-American author of The Old Drift, a novel that attempted nothing less than the entire history of a nation through three families. And Madeleine Thien, whose Do Not Say We Have Nothing wove the Chinese Cultural Revolution into a story of music, memory, and political erasure. These are writers who think in centuries and write in sentences that know it.
The poetry fellows include Raymond Antrobus, the British-Jamaican poet whose work on deafness and language has quietly expanded what lyric poetry can address, and Rickey Laurentiis, whose collection Boy with Thorn remains one of the most formally daring debut collections of the past decade. Suji Kwock Kim and Vivek Narayanan round out a list that refuses to settle into any single tradition.
In drama, the selection includes Penny Arcade, the legendary downtown New York performance artist, and Haruna Lee, whose cross-cultural, formally restless work has been reshaping how we think about Asian American theatre.
What interests me about this year’s class is not any individual name but the cumulative shape. The Guggenheim, unlike some prizes, does not reward a single book. It rewards a direction — the sense that a writer is moving somewhere that matters, and that the destination is not yet known. There is something Nordic in that sensibility, if you will forgive the personal reference: the idea that the most important work is the work that has not yet been done, the sentence that has not yet found its ending.
Thirty-five writers. Thirty-five unfinished directions. What will they bring back?
