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