Five Writers Under 35 the National Book Foundation Believes In
There is something quietly reassuring about an institution that bets on beginnings. Every year, the National Book Foundation announces its 5 Under 35, a program with a structure unlike most prizes: established writers — past winners and nominees — are each asked to choose one debut author whose first book moved them enough to stake their own name on. The results for 2026 arrived this week, and they are worth sitting with.
The honorees: Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, whose collection Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare (Bloomsbury) was chosen by Kali Fajardo-Anstine; Anika Jade Levy, selected by Sigrid Nunez for Flat Earth (Catapult); Carrie R. Moore, picked by Danielle Evans for Make Your Way Home (Tin House); Maggie Su, whose novel Blob: A Love Story (Harper) was chosen by Charles Yu; and Stephanie Wambugu, selected by Kaveh Akbar for Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown). Five books. Five selectors who have read thousands of others and still chose these.
What strikes me is not just the names but the logic of the selection itself. Each selector is asked not merely to recommend but to champion — to attach their credibility to a single voice. There is something in this that recalls the Nordic tradition of literary godparenthood, in which an established writer formally introduces a new one to the public. The NBF program feels like an American version of that: a ritual of transmission, not a publicity exercise, even if it is both at once.
The titles alone reward attention. Blob: A Love Story — chosen by Charles Yu, whose own work has always moved comfortably between genre and literary fiction — promises something strange and earnest in equal measure. Lonely Crowds, championed by Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!, is a title that can mean almost anything, which is often a good sign in debut work. And Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare carries its provocation inside the grammar — the syntax itself refuses you the comfort of neutrality.
The celebration takes place June 9 at Littlefield in Brooklyn, hosted by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and streamed for those who cannot attend. Each honoree receives $1,250, which is not a fortune but, as these things go, is never the point. The point is the chain of acknowledgment: this work was seen, by someone who knows what seeing costs.
I do not know yet which of these five will still matter in twenty years. But that is always the question, isn't it — not which debuts are good, but which ones feel necessary in some way that you cannot quite explain yet.
