The Whiting Foundation announced the 10 winners of its 2026 Whiting Award for emerging writers on April 15 in New York. Each recipient will receive a $50,000 prize intended to support early-career writers across fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. The 2026 honorees are Negar Azimi, Elaine Castillo, Karen Hao, Hajar Hussaini, Hilary Leichter, Lara Mimosa Montes, Brittany Rogers, Alison C. Rollins, Celine Song and Carvell Wallace. Judges highlighted a wide-ranging set of work — from Karen Hao’s investigative writing on artificial intelligence to Hajar Hussaini’s poems about Kabul, Brittany Rogers’s Detroit-centered verse, and Celine Song’s innovations in drama — describing the cohort as offering “a kaleidoscopic view of this moment.” The ceremony at The New-York Historical featured a keynote from Max Rudin; past Whiting recipients have included writers who later won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards and Tonys. Since 1985 the foundation has distributed more than $10 million to hundreds of writers, and this year’s selections underscore a blend of formal experimentation and urgent topical concerns across genres.

Veronica Roth announced on April 18, 2026 at BookCon in New York that she is returning to her bestselling Divergent universe with a two‑book duology beginning with The Sixth Faction, due Oct. 6, 2026. HarperCollins says the pair of novels will sit in a companion timeline to the original trilogy and are explicitly neither prequels nor sequels: the first book rewinds the story to ask what would have happened if protagonist Beatrice (Tris) Prior had made a different Choosing Ceremony decision. Roth described the project as a reimagining that allows her to revisit the world that launched her career while addressing aspects of the original story she’s long wrestled with. The announcement coincides with the 15th anniversary of Divergent, the YA franchise that has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide and spawned three films (with a planned fourth never completed). HarperCollins called The Sixth Faction a “tour de force”; no adaptation plans have been announced. Roth has said the work represents a fresh creative reckoning with both the series’ legacy and her own past responses to fame and criticism.