Minnesota Book Award Winners and Finalists 2026

"A young boy learns the Cherokee lesson of gadugi from his grandmother and how working together and helping each other makes the whole community stronger"-- Provided by publisher.

"Hana Babic is a quiet middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared. Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia--until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter...

A new classmate helps bullied ten-year-old Daisy find her voice. Daisy has been working on invisibilizing herself--ever since living with her mother's violent ex-boyfriend, and now to avoid the school bullies who are targeting her. She keeps a low profile, eating lunch with the librarian instead of in the Lunchroom of Terror and secretly counting whenever she's anxious. But things are looking up. A new boy has befriended her and seems able to stand...

"In the prairie town of Andwhen, Minnesota, members of a small congregation don't know if they've been blessed or cursed when the ashes administered during an Ash Wednesday service won't wash off. This event leads Basil, a "gentle giant" of a teen, to make a secret vow to save his family through prayer and fasting. His family is in a difficult place, stricken by a recent farming accident and his mother's decade-long confinement to a state mental hospital....

"Spend Saturday morning at the barbershop in this upbeat celebration of the spaces and places that bring communities together"-- Provided by publisher.

"The folk hero Paul Bunyan stands astride the story of the upper Midwest-a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march of industrialization while somehow also maintaining an aura of pristine nature. This conception receives a long overdue and thoroughly revealing correction in Gentlemen of the Woods, a cultural history of the life and lore of the real lumberjack and his true place in American history"-- Provided by publisher....

"A few nights before Halloween, as Cork O'Connor gloomily ruminates on his upcoming sixtieth birthday, he receives a call from his son, Stephen, who is working for a nonprofit dedicated to securing freedom for unjustly incarcerated inmates. Stephen tells his father that twenty years ago, as the newly elected sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork was responsible for sending an Ojibwe man named Axel Boshey to prison for a brutal murder that Stephen is certain...

"Dinah Kendall's role in the U.S. Capitol for the Office of Strategic Services is far from the thrilling espionage career she dreamed of. Instead of covert missions, she crafts rumors aimed at undermining Axis morale while trying to live up to the expectations of her demanding mother, Lillian. As Dinah navigates her duties, she uncovers something startling: Her mother was once a codebreaker, breaking military ciphers during the Great War alongside...

Set in 1963, thirteen-year-old Zenobia and her siblings spend the summer with their grandparents where they fight against the targeted demolition of the neighborhood for a new highway.

Avery is a firecracker. In a crayon box of colors, she's the shocking pink and laser lemon, when all she wants is to be a quiet tan or soft cornflower blue. Her cousin, Jax, is a wall flower, because sometimes it's better to stay quiet when the alternative is to be told that you're doing or saying everything wrong. They seem to be the only ones who don't know what happened years ago when their family shattered and went off in different directions....