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The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Memoir or Autobiography

Finalist: I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir, by Hala Alyan (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

A memoir that reimagines diaspora and the long consequences of war with literary clarity, in which the author’s experiences with infertility and then motherhood are juxtaposed with an intergenerational family history.

Nominated Work

I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir

By

Hala Alyan

 

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • AN ELECTRIC LITERATURE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future.

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman—the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn—to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance.

As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities.

Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to a grain of rice, then a lime, and beyond, Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that confine, holding close those that liberate. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: how to honor ancestors and future generations alike in the midst of displacement? How to impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?

A stunningly lyrical and brutally honest quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a powerful story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

Biography

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
 

Winners

Prize Winner in Memoir or Autobiography in 2026:

Yiyun Li

A writer’s deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life. Memoir or Autobiography

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Memoir or Autobiography in 2026:

Anelise Chen

An experimental and deeply original memoir in which the writer reimagines herself as a clam, using humor and tenderness to explore a fraught relationship with her father and the pressures of being a first-generation daughter of immigrant parents.

Sarah Chihaya

An incisive account that illustrates how literary devotion can sustain but also endanger the self, since literature contains ideas that are perilous and revolutionary as well as restorative.

The Jury

Grace Talusan(Chair)

Assistant Teaching Professor of English, Nonfiction Writing Program, Brown University

Hua Hsu*

Professor of Literature, Bard College and Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Kiese Laymon

Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing, Rice University

Sabrina Orah Mark

Author and Faculty, Bennington College Writing Seminars

Meghan O’Rourke

Editor, The Yale Review and Professor in the Practice, English and Creative Writing, Yale University

Winners in Memoir or Autobiography

2025

Tessa Hulls

An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.
2024

Cristina Rivera Garza

A genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.
2023

Hua Hsu

An elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives.
See All Memoir or Autobiography

2026 Prize Winners

Opinion Writing

M. Gessen of The New York Times

For an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.
See All 2026 Winners