From Belle Burden to Elizabeth Strout, New England Booksellers Name 2026 Book Award Winners
The 2026 New England Book Awards went to a memoir, a novel, a poetry collection and three books for young readers, chosen by independent booksellers and named Sept. 16 at the Fall Conference of the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA) in Newton, Massachusetts. Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage won in nonfiction and Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say in fiction. Bianca Stone’s The Near and Distant World took poetry, Brian Lies’s Cat Nap won picture book, Jada Fitch and Kateri Kosek’s The Forest Revealed won middle grade, and Katie Abdou’s A Prince Among Pirates won young adult.
How the New England Book Awards Work
Booksellers choose the winners: any bookseller who works at an active NEIBA member store may submit titles and vote from the ballot of finalists. The awards go to books by New England authors, and a book doesn’t need a regional author if it’s about New England or set there. Eligible titles must have been published between Sept. 1, 2025, and Aug. 31, 2026.
For 20 years, NEIBA used the awards to recognize the body of work of New England authors. In 2010 it shifted the focus to specific titles in fiction, nonfiction and children’s categories, and it added a young adult award in 2017. NEIBA also gives a President’s Award for lifetime achievement in arts and letters. The 2026 honoree is Rajani LaRocca.
Belle Burden’s Strangers Takes the Nonfiction Prize
Belle Burden, an attorney who specializes in juvenile immigration cases, won from a field of five nonfiction finalists. The others were Keisha N. Blain’s Without Fear: Black Women and the Making of Human Rights (W. W. Norton), Aaron Mahnke’s Exhumed (Running Press), Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Edge of Space-Time (Pantheon) and Tillie Walden’s Charity and Sylvia (Drawn & Quarterly). Earlier winners of the category include Ethan Tapper’s How to Love a Forest in 2025, Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp in 2023 and Isaac Fitzgerald’s Dirtbag, Massachusetts in 2022.
Strangers was published Jan. 13 by The Dial Press and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Burden reads the audiobook herself.
Burden first wrote about the end of her marriage in a Modern Love essay, “Was I Married to a Stranger?” It ran in The New York Times on June 30, 2023. A week into a pandemic quarantine at the family’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, Burden’s husband told her he wanted a divorce, and she hadn’t known he was unhappy. “I knew nothing, only the shock of his disappearance,” Burden wrote.
Elizabeth Strout Wins Fiction With The Things We Never Say
The Things We Never Say was published May 5 by Random House. It follows Artie Dam, a high school history teacher in a small coastal town who sails on Massachusetts Bay. Artie keeps turning over how little people know about one another, even those closest to them. Strout has said the character grew from two sources: an old obituary of an ordinary-looking man with a kind face, and a story from a man in Maine who, with his father, had pulled a man out of the water off the Massachusetts coast. The Financial Times called the book “a profound, resplendent novel.”
Strout is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the novel is on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. It isn’t her first Booker shortlist: Oh William! made the cut in 2022.
Fiction finalists also included John Chu’s The Subtle Art of Folding Space (Tor Books), Allegra Goodman’s This Is Not About Us (The Dial Press), Christine Baker Kline’s The Foursome (Mariner Books) and Ruth Ozeki’s The Typing Lady (Viking Penguin). The Dial Press also publishes Strangers. Recent fiction winners include Annie Hartnett’s The Road to Tender Hearts in 2025, Daniel Mason’s North Woods in 2024 and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface in 2023. Strout received NEIBA’s President’s Award in 2016.
Bianca Stone’s The Near and Distant World Wins Poetry
Stone’s collection, published Jan. 13 by Tin House, gathers 51 poems that range from a conversation with an internet technician in Brooklyn to Greek mythology, psychoanalysis and modern philosophy. Allusions to Jordan Peele’s Nope and Rilke’s elegies appear alongside poems about finding a self amid parenthood, global change and mortality.
Stone was born and raised in Vermont. She’s been the state’s poet laureate since 2024, and her term runs through 2029. Her earlier collection What Is Otherwise Infinite won the 2022 Vermont Book Award, and she co-founded the poetry nonprofit Ruth Stone House.
Four other poets were finalists alongside Stone: Joshua Bennett for We (The People of the United States) (Penguin Books), Maggie Dietz for If You Would Let Me (Four Way Books), Isabel Neal for Thrown Voice (Yale University Press) and Diana Whitney for Girl Trouble (CavanKerry Press). Past winners include Stephanie Burt’s Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry after Stonewall in 2025, James Crews’s The Wonder of Small Things in 2024 and Oliver de la Paz’s The Diaspora Sonnets in 2023.
Brian Lies Takes Picture Book With Cat Nap
Cat Nap was published Sept. 30, 2025, by Greenwillow Books. A sleepy kitten’s afternoon nap becomes a trip through the galleries of an art museum. As the cat and a mouse leap from one page to the next, they appear in the style of an ancient Egyptian relief, an illuminated manuscript, a stained-glass window and a ceramic dog, and Lies re-created each work by hand in its original medium. His author biography says the book features handmade replicas of nine artworks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Lies is the author and illustrator of more than 30 children’s books. His New York Times bestselling bat series begins with Bats at the Beach. His 2019 Caldecott Honor book was The Rough Patch, and Cat Nap earned seven starred reviews. In July, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators named it the Crystal Kite Award winner for New England, a peer-voted honor.
Lies also illustrated More, a book by I. C. Springman that won the children’s category in 2012. Four other books were picture book finalists this year: Shauntay Grant and Daniel Minter’s The Deepest Blue (Quill Tree Books), Lesléa Newman and Z.B. Asterplume’s Rainbow Cookies (Levine Querido), Adrienne Thurman and Mags DeRoma’s The Brunch Shift (Random House Studio) and Lauren Wolk and Kristen Adam’s The Outermost Mouse (Dutton Books for Young Readers). Regina Linke’s Big Enough won in 2025.
The Forest Revealed Takes Middle Grade
The Forest Revealed: An Illustrated Year was published Sept. 9, 2025, by Storey Publishing. The 96-page book follows the northern forest through 12 paintings by Jada Fitch, one for each month, each with a numbered key for finding the animals, plants, insects and fungi in the scene. Writer and naturalist Kateri Kosek supplies the text on the hidden stories and facts behind them. Kosek’s poetry and essays have appeared in Orion and Northern Woodlands, and she lectures in English at Northwestern Connecticut Community College.
Fitch, a Maine artist, said in the Bangor Daily News that she began the project in her free time, just for fun. She said she isn’t really a writer, so Storey brought in Kosek to put words to the paintings.
The middle grade ballot also listed Norm Feuti’s A Kid Like Me (HarperAlley), Maddie Frost’s Really Rubie (Aladdin), Freddie Kölsch’s Spindlewood (Balzer + Bray) and Lynn Plourde’s The Bionic Boy (Nancy Paulsen Books). Tiffany D. Jackson’s Blood in the Water won in 2025, and in 2024 the category produced a tie between Grace Lin’s Chinese Menu and Jonathan Todd’s Timid.
Katie Abdou’s Debut A Prince Among Pirates Wins Young Adult
A Prince Among Pirates, Abdou’s debut novel, was published June 16 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers and runs 416 pages. It follows Kit Davenport, a nobleman who accidentally joins a pirate ship and falls for its captain.
Abdou was born and raised on the coast of Massachusetts, where, according to her publisher biography, she developed an interest in history, the occult and piracy. She lives in the state today.
Young adult finalists also included Kelly Andrew’s The Gravewood (Scholastic Press), Kylie Lee Baker’s I’ll Find You Where the Timeline Ends (Feiwel & Friends), Amanda Foody and C. L. Herman’s A Fate So Cold (Tor Teen) and Karyn Parsons’s Blue Beach (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Sacha Lamb won the category in 2025 with The Forbidden Book and in 2023 with When the Angels Left the Old Country. Kenneth Cadow won in 2024 for Gather.
What Comes Next for the Winners
The Booker Prize winner won’t be named until Nov. 9, and Strout’s novel is one of the six contenders. Strangers is in development as a Netflix feature starring Gwyneth Paltrow, with Heidi Schreck adapting the screenplay.
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