GrubStreet and the National Book Foundation are delighted to present a conversation with 2026 Science + Literature Fiction Award honoree Anna North, discussing her newest novel, Bog Queen, and the impact of human ambition in art and science. North will be joined by Akil Kumarasamy, author of the novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea and a 2026 Science + Literature selection committee member.

In the gorgeous new novel by the New York Times bestselling author of Outlawed, “a strangely well-preserved Iron Age body turns up in an English bog, and the American forensic anthropologist on the case is thrust into an absorbing, complex mystery” (People magazine).

When a body is found in a bog in northwest England, Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is called to investigate. But this body is not like any she's ever seen. Though its bones prove it was buried more than two thousand years ago, it is almost completely preserved.

Soon Agnes is drawn into a mystery from the distant past, called to understand and avenge the death of an Iron Age woman more like her than she knows. Along the way, she must contend with peat-cutters who want to profit from the bog and activists who demand that the land be left undisturbed. Then there's the moss itself: a complex repository of artifacts and remains, with its own dark stories to tell.

As Agnes faces the deep history of what she has unearthed, she's also forced to question what she thought she knew about her talent, her self-reliance, and her place in the world. Flashing between the uncertainty of post-Brexit England and the druidic order of Celtic Europe at the dawn of the Roman era, Bog Queen brims with contemporary urgency and ancient wisdom as it connects across time two gifted, farsighted young women learning to harness their strange strengths in a landscape more mysterious and complex than either can imagine.

Anna North is the author of the novels America Pacifica, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, and Outlawed, which was an instant New York Times bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick. She is also a senior correspondent at Vox. Her most recent novel, Bog Queen, was a national bestseller.

Akil Kumarasamy is the author of the linked story collection Half Gods, which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, and the novel Meet Us by the Roaring Sea. She received the Bard Fiction Prize and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was a finalist for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, Lambda Literary Award, and PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. She has attended residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, Callie’s Berlin, among others. She is an associate professor in the Rutgers University-Newark MFA program and a 2024–25 Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

The National Book Foundation's Science + Literature program identifies three books annually, across genres, that deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology, and focuses on highlighting the diversity of voices in contemporary science and technology writing. Science + Literature is made possible by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Read more about the Science + Literature program on the National Book Foundation's website.

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