Bret Stephens recently wrote a column about the National Book Awards which opened with a lie.
Last week, the longlists for the National Book Awards were announced. Among the 20 authors in the fiction and nonfiction categories, nearly all are straight white males. Most are also on the political right, some even on the far right.
In fact, as he explained just a paragraph later, that's the opposite of the truth. In reality the book awards are completely dominated by DEI for both fiction and non-fiction works. The actual list of possible winners seems to exclusively be about issues of current concern to progressives.
Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel, “Paradiso 17,” is “inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father.” Kimberly Blaeser, a poet, is the “founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets.” Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American writer whose novel “Dèy” reflects on “the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification and diasporic identity.” Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You,” set in 1990s Bogotá, “explores Colombia’s queer underground community.” Louise Erdrich, the highly acclaimed author of “Python’s Kiss,” is identified in her N.B.F. biography as “a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.” Marlon James’s novel “The Disappearers” is a “queer epic” set in Kingston, Jamaica. Valeria Luiselli is a writer born in Mexico whose “Beginning Middle End” spans “continents, languages and four generations.” Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer; his first novel, “The Renovation,” is a story about a family migrating from Istanbul to Italy. Morgan Thomas’s book “Mad Eden” is about “a trans health care worker” who has been diagnosed with autism...
Then there’s the longlist for nonfiction. Much of the same in terms of subject matter: There’s a book about “the rise of Islamophobia in America.” Another about “an experiment in queer parenthood.” A third that’s “an argument against white paint.” (Really.) Last year’s nonfiction winner was a screed about the war in Gaza born of a viral anti-Israel social media post written weeks after Oct. 7.
And it's not just this year. This has been going on for all of Woke 1.0. Only minority writers or topics can win. Straight, white authors need not apply.
By my count, in the past decade, nine of the 10 winners of the National Book Award for fiction belonged to a minority group. In the nonfiction category, 10 of 10. Bluntly, the National Book Award has become a D.E.I. checklist: Only authors with preferred identities, preferred topics and preferred politics stand any realistic chance of winning.
The Pulitzer Prizes are also handed out exclusively to these same groups.
Of the past 10 years’ worth of winners for music and drama, nearly all have been minorities. Whether or not the winners are themselves minorities, they almost invariably win for work about minorities. For the prize in history, Kathleen DuVal won in 2025 for her history of Native American nations; Jacqueline Jones in 2024 for her account of Black workers in Boston during the Civil War; Jefferson Cowie in 2023 for his examination of white supremacy in an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries; W. Caleb McDaniel in 2020 for his story of a former slave’s fight for justice in post-Civil War America; David Blight in 2019 for his biography of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
These are undoubtedly fine books. Are there no other subjects?
These awards appear to be political project at this point and it's hard to overstate how common that is. The NY Times just published its list of the 100 best TV shows of this century (so far) and it's striking how many of them seem to have not only been selected but made in the first place to make some political point that progressives all agree is profound.
It's not just the award-givers who remain woke in 2026, it's most of the people vying for those awards, all of whom know that only the wokest and queerest of tales have a shot at claiming the prize.
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