Here are the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners.
Since 2017, the Pulitzer committee has recognized outstanding journalism, criticism, books, dramas, and achievements in music with their coveted prizes. And winners walk away with $15,000 and the endless respect of their peers.
This year’s awards were announced today via livestream at 3pm. Here are the lucky torch-bearers in the arts and letters categories.
FICTION
Winner:
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
Finalists:
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Viking),
Mice 1961 by Stacey Levine (Verse Chorus Press),
The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones (Beacon Press)
*
DRAMA
Winner:
Purpose by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Finalists:
Oh, Mary! by Cole Escola
The Ally by Itamar Moses
*
HISTORY
Winners:
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press)
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Random House)
Finalist:
Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery by Seth Rockman (University of Chicago)
*
BIOGRAPHY
Winner:
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts (Random House)
Finalists:
John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg (Simon & Schuster)
The World She Edited: Katherine S. White at The New Yorker by Amy Reading (Mariner Books)
*
MEMOIR
Winner:
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (MCD/FSG)
Finalists:
Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller (Grove Press)
I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante (Penguin Press)
*
POETRY
Winner:
New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe (W.W. Norton & Company)
Finalists:
An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon Press)
Bluff: Poems by Danez Smith (Graywolf Press)
*
GENERAL NONFICTION
Winner:
To the Success of our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press)
Finalists:
Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala by Rachel Nolan (Harvard University Press)
I Am On the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and The Rise of Autocracy in India by Rollo Romig (Penguin Books)
*
MUSIC
Winner:
Sky Islands by Susie Ibarra
Finalists:
The Comet by George Lewis,
Jim is Still Crowing by Jalalu Kalvert Nelson
*
CRITICISM
Winner:
Alexandra Lange, Bloomberg
Finalists:
Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker
Sara Holdren, Vulture
*
SPECIAL CITATION:
Chuck Stone, “for his groundbreaking work as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement.”
See the full list of winners—including all the writers recognized for journalism, commentary, photography, graphic arts, and reportage—here.
