FLATBUSH — Distinguished Professor of English Ben Lerner has been awarded the 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for his acclaimed novel, “Transcription.”
Published in April and released in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and in the U.K. by Granta Books, “Transcription” blends personal vulnerability with broader cultural critique. The novel follows a narrator navigating illness, memory and the pervasive influence of digital technologies as he confronts the ways language, transcription and mediation shape our understanding of reality.
At once intimate and expansive, the book probes how we construct meaning — and mislead ourselves — through the stories we tell about hunger, love, connection and the body.
Chair of judges for the Political Fiction prize Fiammetta Rocco praised the work, saying, “For a book so slim, ‘Transcription’ does so much. A forensic study of our insatiable appetite for new technology, it explores the unreliable stories we tell ourselves about hunger, love and connection.”
The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, R.I., where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail from the future and the past simultaneously and who reenchants the air when he speaks, but the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world.
One of the first great novels about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight but summoning the intensity of a séance, Lerner’s writing shows us how the air is full of messages and full of ghosts.
Lerner is a celebrated novelist, poet and essayist, as well as a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, often known as the “Genius Grant.”
His genre-defying body of work has earned widespread acclaim for its originality and philosophical depth. Among his many honors, Lerner has also received a National Book Award nomination, been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, further cementing his reputation as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation.
Throughout his career, Lerner has challenged the boundaries between literary forms, seamlessly blending fiction, poetry and criticism while examining the pressures and paradoxes of contemporary life. His work consistently invites readers to question the nature of art, authorship and authenticity in a rapidly changing world.
