Bret Stephens has slammed the National Book Awards as a “DEI checklist” driven by “bald politicization.”
The outlet columnist, 51, made the attack in a Tuesday column after analyzing the awards’ winners and finalists over the past decade. His critique zeroed in on stark demographic patterns he said have transformed one of America’s most prestigious literary honors.
Of the 10 fiction awards handed out by the National Book Foundation since 2015, nine went to minority authors and just one to a white author, Stephens noted. The non-fiction category showed an even more lopsided trend: all 10 winners during that same period were minority authors.
“The National Book Awards are no longer national in any meaningful sense,” Stephens wrote in his Times column. “At best, they represent the recondite tastes of that fraction of the country.”
The 2026 finalists followed a similar template, according to Stephens. Nine of the 10 fiction finalists came from minority authors, with subjects ranging from race to sexual orientation. Only one book was from a Jewish, white and straight male, which Stephens argued “in a sane world, should have no bearing on whether his book deserves to make the longlist.”
The non-fiction finalists included a book about “an experiment in queer parenthood,” another about “the rise of Islamophobia in America,” and a third that made “an argument against white paint,” according to the National Book Foundation’s longlist.
Stephens suggested the foundation’s focus on minority authors and subjects could amount to a literary “form of reparations” — but one that would perpetuate rather than solve the original problem.
“As an old friend of mine liked to say, turning the tables isn’t the same thing as achieving justice,” he added. “The bald politicization of the nation’s highest literary prizes is achieving several forms of injustice at once.”
He warned the practice was “deforming and hollowing” American literature, with consequences for both readers and future writers.
“Writers or scholars whose subjects or views don’t fit the preferences of prize givers will pay a price for their intellectual independence,” Stephens wrote. “Others, not keen on careers of penury and oblivion, will never become writers or scholars in the first place.”
He closed by quoting “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
The National Book Award has been presented since 1950 and counts Philip Roth, William Faulkner, Joan Didion and Flannery O’Connor among its past recipients. For most of its history, the vast majority of winners were white men, a pattern that has fueled longstanding criticisms that minority voices were systematically excluded from consideration.
Those earlier exclusions have been cited by defenders of the recent trends as a necessary correction after decades of underrepresentation. Stephens did not address that framing directly, instead treating the current demographic skew as a distinct problem requiring its own remedy.
The foundation has not issued a public response to Stephens’ column.