The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri won the 2025 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The winners were announced at the 76th National Book Awards ceremony in New York City on Wednesday night.

“I don’t know why I should be so lucky,” Nayeri began his acceptance speech. “Ten years ago, I was an editor downtown. I had an office on Varick St. The office was high up and the windows looked down across the street on the federal immigration building, where every day the line was around the block for asylum seekers. I would walk past them in the morning, then get to my office and stand at the window and watch, remembering, of course, that 20 years ago, my family had done the exact same thing. We were asylum seekers.”

When coworkers would catch their Iranian American colleague staring out the window, he joked that so far the United States had only let him across the street, and the jury was still out on whether he would be fully welcomed in this country.

“I didn’t know how to express that I had somehow managed to be in the office, not in the street,” said Nayeri, who added the National Book Award to his growing list of accolades that include a Printz Award for Everything Sad is Untrue and a Newbery Honor for The Many Assassinations of Samir, Seller of Dreams. “Why should anybody be so lucky? How could I stand there and withstand the payload of such generosity?...

“There is no accounting for luck,” he continued. “There’s no reason I should be here, not my great and talented colleagues. I don’t know how to manage it. But I know I can never make that joke again, because standing here with this award, friends, you sure know how to make a boy feel welcome.”

Author David Bowles, who chaired the Young People’s Literature judges committee, introduced the winner and shared what committee members considered when selecting the five finalists and eventually a winner.

“In a time when public discourse has become increasingly fraught and young people are living with more uncertainty than ever, literature has never mattered more,” Bowles said. “Teen readers are looking for stories that validate their questions, their fears, their longings. 

“They’re seeking books that wrestle with the world they inhabit, the shifting landscape of identity, justice, belonging, and hope.

“As judges we felt a profound responsibility to honor works that don’t speak down to young readers but instead trust them, challenge them, comfort them, and call them to expand their horizons, because the lives they live demand nothing less.”

Along with Nayeri’s novel, the finalists were Kyle Lukoff’s A World Worth Saving, Amber McBride’s The Leaving Room, Hannah V. Sawyerr’s Truth Is, and Ibi Zoboi’s (S)Kin.

The National Book Foundation’s annual celebration was hosted by Emmy winning actor Jeff Hiller. Among the night’s honorees was writer Roxane Gay, who was given the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. She did not hold back in her acceptance speech, calling out the power of the people in the room and the need for them to “do better.”

“Even though the resources of this abundant world are distributed inequitably, that really does not have to be the case in publishing,” Gay said. “There is room for all of our voices, and the people in this room have the power to do better. You have the power to address the imbalances of who gets the big fancy advances and who is left to wither on the vine. You have the power to ensure that writers from all walks of life have genuine opportunities to publish their books. You have the power to abandon old ways of thinking and nonsense metrics like social media followings as a determining factor in buying a manuscript. You don’t need to commission studies. You don’t need special initiatives. You just need to adjust your math a little bit and expand your thinking.

“There’s nothing I can say here that publishers don’t already know, but I hope that the people gathered here tonight for this wonderful celebration recognize that you have the power to create the change that the publishing industry so desperately needs, and you will be remembered for how you use that power or how you don’t.”