2025 Book Award Winners
Percival Everett won the Pulitzer for James, a year after its National Book Award. David Szalay won the Booker for Flesh, Yael van der Wouden won the Women's Prize for The Safekeep, and László Krasznahorkai received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
20 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
-
James
Everett retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the man Twain called Jim, and the first thing he changes is the voice. In...
-
Flesh
Istvan is fifteen, living with his mother in a quiet apartment block in Hungary, friendless at school and almost entirely silent. A married...
-
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Raja is sixty three, a beloved high school philosophy teacher in Beirut, gay, wry and exquisitely put upon, and he shares a tiny apartment with the...
-
The Safekeep
Isabel lives alone in her late mother's house in rural Overijssel, in a Netherlands fifteen years past the war and determined to say nothing about...
-
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
Benjamin Nathans traces the Soviet dissident movement from the years after Stalin's death, when the regime's methods of suppressing opposition...
-
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War
Edda L. Fields-Black reconstructs the Combahee River Raid of June 1863, the Union operation Harriet Tubman helped plan and guide that freed more...
-
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
Kathleen DuVal tells a thousand year history of Indigenous nations across North America, beginning well before European contact with cities like...
-
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts follows two eighteenth century naturalists racing to do the same impossible thing, catalog and organize every living creature on...
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
The title is a prophecy and an accusation at once. In October 2023, as the bombardment of Gaza began, the novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad...
-
How to End a Story
Helen Garner has been keeping a diary all her writing life, and this collection gathers the volumes covering 1978 to 1998: from the aftermath of...
-
Our Brains, Our Selves: What a Neurologist's Patients Taught Him About the Brain
Husain's book is built from seven patients, seven people whose brain disorders each dissolved a different pillar of what we casually call the self,...
-
New and Selected Poems
New and Selected Poems draws on four decades of Marie Howe's work, gathering material from her four previous collections, The Good Thief, What the...
-
Wellwater
Wellwater is a book about what sustains life where life is hard, water first of all, and it swept the poetry prizes of its year on both sides of...
-
The Tainted Cup
A senior officer is found dead in a wealthy household with a tree growing out of him, roots through the ribs, blossom coming out of the mouth....
-
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
In 2012 a worker renovating a Montana parsonage finds a journal hidden in its wall. It was written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a minister who...
-
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
In 2012 a worker renovating a Montana parsonage finds a journal hidden in its wall. It was written in 1912 by Arthur Beaucarne, a minister who...
-
The In Crowd
A wedding party glitters in the garden of a Georgian villa on the Thames in Richmond, Pimm's and hierarchy in equal measure, while a few miles...
-
The First State of Being
It is 1999 in this novel, and twelve year old Michael is anxious about the coming millennium in the specific, catalog hoarding way of a kid who has...
-
Chooch Helped
In Oklahoma, an older sister named Oginalii spends much of the book frustrated with her younger brother Chooch, who tags along everywhere and...
-
Satantango
A Hungarian agricultural collective is collapsing, its land soaked by rain that never seems to let up, when word spreads through the handful of...
What Shaped 2025
James swept the year, taking the National Book Award and then the Pulitzer, which is a rare confirmation that a book everyone admired at once will last. Krasznahorkai's Nobel honoured a Hungarian novelist whose sentences run for pages and whose books had reached English slowly through devoted translators. Van der Wouden's The Safekeep, a first novel about a Dutch house and what happened to the family who lived in it before the war, won the Women's Prize.
Published in 2025, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2025 and took no major award.
-
No major prizePlayworld
Griffin Hurt is fourteen in the fall of 1980, an actor on a hit network show called The Nuclear Family who spends his weekdays at an elite...
-
No major prizeThe Emperor of Gladness
Nineteen year old Hai is standing on King Philip's Bridge above East Gladness, Connecticut, ready to jump, when Grazina Vitkus, an eighty year old...