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Finalist: Audition, by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books)

A novel containing two competing yet seemingly unrelated narratives whose uncertainties, contradictions and congruencies address the roles we play in life as well as our sense of self.

Nominated Work

Audition

 

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY BARACK OBAMA, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE NEW YORKER, NPR, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, MARIE CLAIRE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE GUARDIAN AND MORE!

FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE, THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE, THE GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE, AND THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE AND THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“A tightly wound family drama that reads like a psychological thriller.”—NPR

“Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.”—The Boston Globe

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

Biography

Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Winners

Prize Winner in Fiction in 2026:

Daniel Kraus

A breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence. Fiction

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2026:

Torrey Peters

A story collection that explores versions of transgender consciousness across literary forms that seem familiar but whose effects are strange, challenging and ultimately fresh.

The Jury

Rebecca Makkai(Chair)

Author and Faculty in Writing, Northwestern University

Victor LaValle

Associate Professor of Writing, Columbia University

Mark McGurl

Albert Guérard Professor of Literature & Professor of English, Stanford University

Elizabeth Strout*

Writer, Brunswick, Maine

David Treuer

Writer, Editor and Professor of English, University of Southern California

Winners in Fiction

Percival Everett

An accomplished reconsideration of “Huckleberry Finn” that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.

Jayne Anne Phillips

A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.

Hernan Diaz

A riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition through linked narratives rendered in different literary styles, a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.

Joshua Cohen

A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.

2026 Prize Winners

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.