Eileen O’Grady
Harvard Staff Writer
Valeria Luiselli named finalist for 2026 National Book Award
Her 2026 title “Beginning Middle End” is among five novels in consideration for fiction prize
Valeria Luiselli is a finalist for the 2026 National Book Award in Fiction, the National Book Foundation announced Tuesday.
Luiselli, an incoming professor of English, was nominated for her novel “Beginning Middle End.”It tells the story of a mother and 12-year-old daughter starting over in Sicily after the elder’s divorce, as they figure out how to rebuild amid encounters with the island’s daily life and its winds, waters, and volcanoes.
“For me, ‘Beginning Middle End’ was, from the start, primarily a deep dive into mother-daughter relationships across generations,” Luiselli said in an August interview with The FAS Current. “It’s a book about motherhood, but also about daughterhood and the role that memory and imagination play in intergenerational storytelling, in the way that we configure our identities as women within a family.”
The novel began to take shape during Luiselli’s time at Harvard from 2022 to 2024 as a visiting professor of ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration and then as a visiting professor of English.
“I feel like my writing process with this novel was very much like building a mosaic piece,” Luiselli continued. “When I have enough subject matter, enough little pieces, I can start playing with textures and colors and internal architectures, and I can start seeing shapes.”
Winners of the National Book Award will be announced November 18 at a ceremony in New York City.
Other 2026 finalists with Harvard connections include Stephen J. Epstein ’84, in the translated literature category, for translating Intan Paramaditha’s “Night of a Thousand Hells” from the original Indonesian in collaboration with Tiffany Tsao. Victoria Chang, M.A. ’94 is a finalist in the poetry category for her book “Tree of Knowledge.”
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