Hanif Abdurraqib (Kendra Bryant).

American essayist, poet, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib has been named the winner of the 2026 Weston International Award.

The $75,000 award, administered by the Writers’ Trust of Canada, honours an international author for their career achievement in literary nonfiction.

Abdurraqib’s essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of four books, including the lauded essay collections They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and Go Ahead in the Rain, the award-winning A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, and his most recent book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Abdurraqib was selected as the recipient of this year’s award in a two-stage process: a three-person international advisory committee creates a confidential longlist, and a five-member Canadian jury selects the winner. The international advisory committee for this year’s award was comprised of PBS NewsHour senior correspondent and chief arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown, British-Iranian author and The Guardian literary editor David Shariatmadari, and Nigerian author, literary festival director, and publisher Lola Shoneyin.

The Canadian jury was comprised of columnist and professor Dean Jobb, nonfiction writer and filmmaker Chase Joynt, author Tessa McWatt, writer and scholar Christina Sharpe, and author Jenny Heijun Wills.

“Whether writing on basketball, dance, music, or policing and violence, he calls out falsehoods, centres the marginalized, and affirms that ‘they can’t kill us until they kill us.’ Across Abdurraqib’s masterful and genre-bending work, the local and specific are spun inward and outward in ways that manifest a deep connection to people, place, and the world,” the jury wrote in their citation. “He combines searing insights into Blackness and social inequality in the United States with themes of love and belonging, life and death. The work sings and stings and brings truths, both personal and communal, as he voices culture and its complexities with bold, compassionate lyricism and a real sense of love.”

Abdurraqib is the fourth writer to win the Weston International Award, which was announced in 2023 as part of a funding commitment from the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation, which also supports the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Leslie Jamison won last year’s award, and British writer Robert Macfarlane was its inaugural winner.

Abdurraqib will appear in conversation with a Canadian author at an event in Toronto on Sept. 14 to discuss the place of nonfiction writing in our world.