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For distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus (Atria Books)

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.

Winning Work

Angel Down

 

 

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“This novel leaves you breathless.” —Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author

“A thunderous gallop of a war novel, a new classic, a best-in-class example of speculative fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review

The critically acclaimed author of the “crazily enjoyable” (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.

Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man’s Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.

What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.

Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

Biography

Daniel Kraus is a New York Times bestselling writer of novels, TV, and film. His novel Whalefall received a front-cover review in The New York Times Book Review, won the Alex Award, was an LA Times Book Prize Finalist, and was a Best Book of 2023 from NPR, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and more. With Guillermo del Toro, he coauthored The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar–winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus coauthored Trollhunters, which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. His also cowrote The Living Dead and Pay the Piper with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus’s The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s Top 10 Books of the Year. Kraus has won the Bram Stoker Award, Scribe Award, two Odyssey Awards (for both Rotters and Scowler), and has appeared multiple times as Library Guild selections, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, and more. His work has been translated into over twenty languages. He lives with his wife in Chicago.
 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2026:

Katie Kitamura

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.

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.