A Georgetown University visiting English professor was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, the university announced Sept. 22.
Rabih Alameddine received his second National Book Award nomination with his novel “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother).” Alameddine serves as the visiting chair at Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, which fosters interest in the language arts, and was previously the Lannon Medical Humanities scholar-in-residence at the Georgetown Medical Humanities Initiative.
Alameddine said most of his writing centers around the idea of being disturbed from one’s usual position in society.
“Most of my work involves what I would call ‘dislocation,’” Alameddine told The Hoya. “Usually I would write about, you know, an Arab woman in the United States, or a gay man in Lebanon — people who are on the outside — because I am interested in the idea of who belongs and who doesn’t belong.”
The novel follows the story of 63-year-old Raja, a gay philosophy teacher living with his overbearing mother in a small apartment in Beirut, Lebanon, who accepts the opportunity to travel to the United States for a writing fellowship.
Alameddine said the longlisting caught him by surprise and struck him as an honor.
“I got an email or a text from my publicist, and I couldn’t look at it because I was feeding my cats in the morning,” Alameddine said. “The lovely thing about it is that it’s other writers who are voting for it, so to be appreciated by other writers is a wonderful, wonderful thing.”
The National Book Awards, overseen by the nonprofit National Book Foundation, were established in 1950 to honor outstanding literature in the United States and ensure a wide audience and cultural appreciation for books. Alameddine joins a number of other Georgetown faculty to be recognized, including Carolyn Forché, director of readings and talks at the Lannan Center, whose novel “What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance” was a finalist for the award for nonfiction in 2019.
Aminatta Forna, director of the Lannan Center, said the achievement was rightfully due.
“This well-deserved recognition — his second NBA nomination after ‘An Unnecessary Woman,’ a finalist in 2014 — honors a novel that brings his signature blend of dark humor, heartbreak, and narrative complexity to the story of a Lebanese family navigating six decades of history,” Forna wrote to The Hoya.
Alameddine said his particular focus in the novel boiled down to navigating the complexities of clashing family members, while also exploring broader themes of parental trauma and belonging.
“I was interested in people who are outsiders, who are used to getting their own way, who are forced together,” Alameddine said. “In this case, it is an older gay man in his sixties who has to live with his mother, who is, shall we say, a little difficult. Part of the trouble with this book is that it is about two people who are completely devoted to each other but also want to kill each other — which is what families are most of the time.”
Alameddine was born in Jordan and grew up in Kuwait and Lebanon. He pursued an undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, before attending graduate school at the University of San Francisco. Alameddine has worked in a variety of fields, including engineering, painting and carpentry, before returning to his passion for writing.
Isaiah Washington (GRD ’25), a former Lannan Fellow and Alameddine’s student, said Alameddine’s nomination was well deserved.
“Professor Alameddine has given generously to fellow writers, both established and aspiring,” Washington wrote to The Hoya. “It is profoundly moving to see him get honored in such a way for his writing.”
“This incredible recognition is further evidence of what the Lannan Prose Fellows came to understand by the end of our first class session: Professor Alameddine is a master of the craft,” Washington added.
Alameddine said he found his inspiration from other literature, but not always from where he expected.
“I was reading this book, and they mentioned something that was just funny — the writer says that the sound of the rain was doing ‘one-two cha-cha-cha,’” Alameddine said. “And the minute I read that, I started remembering that when I was a child, we all used to do ‘one-two cha-cha-cha’ because the music was easy. I started having these flashbacks and I had this image of two boys dancing together to one-two cha-cha-cha, and that is the start of the image that put it together.”
“I’ve always been a reader, so I’ve always in the back of my mind wanted to be a writer,” Alameddine added.
Alameddine said the most important advice for aspiring writers is figuring out their own story to share.
“I do not know a single person on Earth who does not have a story to tell,” Alameddine said. “The question is always how do you tell the story, and why would anyone be interested in your story?”