The Kirkus Prize has revealed the finalists for its 2026 edition, with Zimbabwean author Blessing Musariri among 18 finalists competing across three categories.
Musariri’s novel When It’s Your Turn for Midnight has been named a finalist in the Young Readers’ Literature category.
“This year’s slate of prize finalists takes readers around the globe while exploring the deepest, most private recesses of the human mind, offering profound windows onto human experience,” Kirkus editor-in-chief Tom Beer said in a statement. “Each book is beautifully written and/or illustrated, brilliantly conceived, and compulsively readable.”
Musariri is an award-winning author of short stories, children’s stories, radio plays, screenplays and contemporary adult fiction. Her titles include All That It Ever Meant (2022) and Only This Once Are You Immaculate (2021). Musariri’s work has also been published by the Guardian, Granta and Poetry International. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.
When It’s Your Turn for Midnight, published in the UK by Bloomsbury Publishing under its Zephyr imprint in 2024 and in the United States by Lerner Publishing Group under its Carolrhoda Lab imprint in April 2026, follows fifteen-year-old Chianti Minana, whose world unravels when her mother reveals in a moment of anger that the man she calls Baba is not her biological father.
Chianti flees to her grandmother’s home in Mutare, where she is drawn into the orbit of four elders, her grandmother’s closest friends, who have been bonded since fighting together in Zimbabwe’s War of Independence in the 1970s. As she helps the group modernise their second-hand clothing business for TikTok, Chianti begins uncovering old photographs and a notebook that hint at a wartime past the elders remain reluctant to discuss.
The Kirkus Prize is one of the world’s richest literary awards, with $50,000 awarded annually in each of its fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature categories. Established in 2014, the prize celebrates the longstanding contribution of Kirkus Reviews to the publishing industry and its readers.
The winners of this year’s prizes will be announced during a ceremony at Tribeca Rooftop in New York, USA, on Wednesday 7 October 2026. The ceremony will also be livestreamed on Kirkus’ YouTube channel.