Welcome to Literary Award Season

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It began with Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize in October, and continued this month with the Booker Prize and the National Book Awards. Our panel of editors discusses what it all means.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the Book Review podcast.
0:09.1	I'm MJ Franklin.
0:10.2	I'm an editor here at the New York Times Book Review,
0:12.5	and this week we are doing something different.
0:15.4	We have just wrapped up book awards season.
0:18.1	The winners of the 2025 Booker Prize, Nobel Prize, and National Book Awards
0:23.2	have all been announced. I feel like we're just swimming in finalists and long lists and books
0:28.8	and all that good stuff. And so I wanted to get together a panel of trusted readers, my colleagues
0:35.1	here at the book review, and just sort through, what do we make of
0:38.1	it all? How do we regard these prizes? What do these awards signal for the state of literature in
0:43.3	2025? And then more specifically, what are these books? Who are these authors? What are these
0:49.2	finalists? Do we like them? Etcetera. So that's what we're here to do today. This is a bit of an experiment. It's just kind of like an open conversation. It's chatty. We don't have a set direction. We're just reacting to the season of awards. And embarking on this adventure with me are a panel of my esteemed colleagues. First, we have Dave Kim. Hi, I'm Jay. And Emily Aiken. Hi, I am Jay.
1:11.2	And you Monica, T.
1:12.1	Hi.
1:12.9	Thank you so much for going on this adventure with me.
1:15.5	Again, we are just reacting to the end of book award season.
1:20.5	Can I just interrupt and say that I actually think it's the beginning of book awards season?
1:25.7	I think technically, yes, it's the end of 2025 and therefore the end of the
1:30.5	2025 book awards. But I think book awards tend to honor the books from a particular year. And so I would say that
1:42.2	the booker is actually the first or one of the earlier book awards that honors the books from 2025.
1:50.0	And the books, the book awards like the Pulitzer and the National Book Critic Circle Awards, those happen early next year or actually even mid-next year, and those all still are
2:02.9	honoring 2025 books that were published in the year 2025. So I think the season actually
	...

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