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Welcome to Literary Award Season
Posted
November 21, 2025
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3,021
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November 21, 2025
3,021
51
4
1.82%
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46:33Now PlayingLiterature isn’t a horse race. Taste is subjective, and artistic value can’t be measured in terms of “winners" and “losers.”
That doesn’t mean it’s not fun to try.
The book world’s awards season officially kicked off on Oct. 9, when the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize, and continued this month when the Booker Prize in England went to the novel “Flesh,” by the British writer David Szalay (also of Hungarian descent, as it happens). Then this week, five National Book Award winners were crowned in various categories at a ceremony in New York.
On this episode of the podcast, the host MJ Franklin talks with his fellow Book Review editors Emily Eakin, Joumana Khatib and Dave Kim about the finalists, the winners and what this year’s big book awards might tell us about the state of literature in 2025.
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