The National Book Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced Wednesday’s honorees for the fifth annual round of the awards, each accompanied by a 10,000 prize. Together, the winners reflect a range of forms, from poetry to fiction to nonfiction, while circling similar questions about nature, identity, and what careful observation can reveal when translated into language meant not just to inform, but to move.
At their core, the awards are a bet on readers: that people still want books that make science feel intimate rather than distant, and that literature can carry the weight of evidence without sacrificing beauty. This year’s selections lean into that promise, spotlighting writers who treat the natural world as both subject and mirror.
Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction Share the Spotlight
Among the honored books is Kimberly Blaeser’s poetry collection, “Ancient Light,” a work shaped in part by the environmental destruction experienced by Indigenous communities. The collection draws on that reality as a living backdrop, using lyric attention to trace what is harmed, what endures, and what demands witnessing when ecosystems and people are placed under pressure.
In fiction, Anna North was recognized for “Bog Queen,” a novel that follows a forensic anthropologist and a 2,000-year-old Celtic druid. The premise bridges deep time and modern expertise, linking the methods of forensic study with the eerie persistence of the past, as if the ground itself could hold both data and myth in the same dark, preserved layer.
The nonfiction winner, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s “Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature,” turns to the natural world with a lens that is both scientific and personal. Its title signals its throughline: an exploration of nature’s richness and complexity, told in a way that makes room for wonder while keeping faith with what observation and study can show.
Taken together, the three books suggest that “science writing” is not a single voice or posture. It can arrive as poem, as story, or as argument built from lived experience and ecological attention, each approach offering a different route into the same larger terrain.
The Awards’ Mission, in the Winners’ Words
In a statement shared with the announcement, Doron Weber, vice president and program director at the Sloan Foundation, praised the honorees for illuminating nature’s splendor as well as its threats. He described the writers as “gifted storytellers” whose work casts both scientific and poetic light on what the natural world discloses about human beings and about life on Earth.
Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation, also framed the awards as an ongoing effort rather than a single celebration. In her statement, she said the latest winners extend the program’s mission to elevate “diverse voices in science writing” that can enlighten, challenge, and engage readers everywhere.
That emphasis on diversity of voice matters in a space that can sometimes default to one kind of authority, one kind of narrator, one kind of reader. By selecting books across genres and perspectives, the awards reinforce the idea that science is not only a set of conclusions but also a way of looking, and that many kinds of storytellers can carry that gaze onto the page.
The result is recognition not just of subject matter, but of method. These winning books treat scientific knowledge as something that can be braided with memory, culture, and narrative momentum, without flattening either side of the braid.
Why Science and Literature Keep Meeting Here
The partnership behind the Science + Literature awards links two institutions with distinct but complementary roles. The National Book Foundation is the organization behind the National Book Awards, a cornerstone event in American letters and a marker of literary prestige. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, meanwhile, has a long track record of backing projects that connect scientific themes with the humanities and the arts.
That history includes support for books that have traveled far beyond the page. The foundation’s past backing encompassed “American Prometheus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, which later became the source material for Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer,” an Oscar-winning adaptation that brought a dense scientific and historical narrative into popular culture.
This year’s awards committee chair, Daisy Hernández, placed the latest honors in a broader context in her own statement. She argued that, “at a time when science is under attack,” it is increasingly urgent to elevate books that unite literary art with scientific wonder.
The phrasing underscores a belief that the stakes are not only aesthetic. When public confidence in science feels fragile, stories can serve as a bridge, giving readers a way to feel the relevance of research in their bones, not just understand it in their heads. In that sense, these awards are less about crowning a niche category and more about keeping a conversation alive between disciplines that were never meant to be strangers.
