Prof. Rabih Alameddine Awarded National Book Award for Fiction

It gives the Department of English and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice great pleasure to announce our very own Lannan Foundation Visiting Chair at Georgetown University, Rabih Alameddine, has won this year’s National Book Award for his novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible. Rabih joined the Lannan Center in 2023. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University in Spring 2023 as well as winner of the 2021 Lannan Prize for Fiction.

Omar El Akkad won the prize for non-fiction for One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. Omar was keynote speaker at the March 2025 Lannan symposium ‘Writing Climate.’

And Patricia Smith, a frequent Lannan guest speaker, won in the poetry category for The Intentions of Thunder.