2025 Pulitzer Prize Winners
| 2025 PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Pulitzer Prize for Fiction | James | Percival Everett | An accomplished reconsideration of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom. |
| Pulitzer Prize for History (Joint Winners) | Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War | Edda L. Fields-Black | A richly-textured and revelatory account of a slave rebellion that brought 756 enslaved people to freedom in a single day, weaving military strategy and family history with the transition from bondage to freedom. |
| Native Nations: A Millennium in North America | Kathleen Duval | A panoramic portrait of Native American nations and communities over a thousand years, a vivid and accessible account of their endurance, ingenuity and achievement in the face of conflict and dispossession. | |
| Pulitzer Prize for Biography | Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life | Jason Roberts | A beautifully written double biography of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, 18th century contemporaries who devoted their lives to identifying and describing nature’s secrets, and who continue to influence how we understand the world. |
| Pulitzer Prize for Memoir | Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir | Tessa Hulls | An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories. |
| Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction | To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement | Benjamin Nathans | A prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights. |
| Pulitzer Prize for Poetry | New and Selected Poems | Marie Howe | A collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness. |
2024 Pulitzer Prize Winners
| Pulitzer Prize for Fiction | Jayne Anne Phillips | Night Watch | A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal. |
| Pulitzer Prize for History | Jacqueline Jones | No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era | A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents. |
| Pulitzer Prize for Biography | Jonathan Eig | King: The Life of Martin Luther King Jr. | A revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination. |
| Ilyon Woo | Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom | A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters. | |
| Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography | Cristina Rivera Garza | Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice | A genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss. |
| Pulitzer Prize for Poetry | Brandon Som | Tripas: Poems | A collection that deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict. |
| Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction | Nathan Thrall | A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy | A finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations. |
