Zimbabwean author Blessing Musariri is the only African writer among the finalists for the 2026 Kirkus Prize, with her young adult novel When It’s Your Turn for Midnight shortlisted in the Young Readers’ Literature category. Musariri joins 17 other finalists across fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature, with six books competing in each of the three main categories. The $50,000 prize is one of the most prominent literary awards in the United States.

Published by Bloomsbury’s Zephyr imprint in the UK in 2024 and by Lerner Publishing Group’s Carolrhoda Lab in the United States in April 2026, When It’s Your Turn for Midnight follows fifteen-year-old Chianti Minana after she discovers that the man she calls Baba is not her biological father. She travels to her grandmother’s home in Mutare, where she becomes involved with four elderly friends who fought together during Zimbabwe’s War of Independence. As Chianti helps them promote their secondhand clothing business on TikTok, she encounters photographs and a notebook that lead her toward the group’s largely unspoken wartime history.

Musariri’s novel is one of two finalists in the Young Adult Literature subgroup, alongside Elizabeth Acevedo’s Anger Is Only a Shadow. The other young readers’ finalists include Julie Leung and Angie Kang’s Navigating Night, Karthika Naïr and Joëlle Jolivet’s Electric Birds of Pothakudi, Matthew Fox’s The Lovely Dark, and Daniel Nayeri’s This Is a Door. The 2026 Kirkus Prize winners will be announced on October 7 at a ceremony at Tribeca Rooftop in New York, with the event also livestreamed on Kirkus Reviews’ YouTube channel. Each of the three main category winners will receive $50,000.

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