Fiction

The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winners Worth Adding to Your TBR

🏆 Just Announced

The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The Pulitzer Prizes were just announced — and this year's list stopped us in our tracks. From a genre-defying WWI novel to a devastating memoir about loss, a sweeping constitutional history to a ground-level reckoning with homelessness in America, these are the winners our team couldn't stop talking about. Consider this your starting point!

Pulitzer Prize

Fiction

Historical FictionSupernatural

Angel Down

by Daniel Kraus

A polyphonic WWI novel about five soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel in No Man's Land — and what happens when survival instincts, jealousy, and greed collide in the presence of something celestial. Kraus weaves the supernatural into the trenches with the kind of moral seriousness the setting demands, and the result is unlike anything else on this year's list.

Literary FictionContemporary

Audition

by Katie Kitamura

A Möbius strip of a novel that runs two competing narratives against each other, asking who we really are to the people closest to us — and how much of any relationship is performance. Kitamura is one of the most precise and unsettling prose stylists working today, and Audition is her most disorienting achievement yet.

Literary FictionLGBTQ+

Stag Dance: A Quartet

by Torrey Peters

The follow-up to Detransition, Baby is a kaleidoscopic collection — one novel and three stories — that pushes the limits of trans writing with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan. Peters is acidly funny and breathtaking in scope, and this collection proves she is one of the most vital voices in contemporary fiction.

Pulitzer Prize

History

HistoryPolitics

We the People

by Jill Lepore

Harvard historian Jill Lepore argues that the framers never intended the Constitution to be frozen in amber — and that amendment, not originalism, is the true American tradition. A sweeping, lavishly illustrated constitutional history that is as radical as it is readable, and as urgent as anything published this year.

HistoryPolitics

King of Kings

by Scott Anderson

A bravura account of the Iranian Revolution — how a seemingly invulnerable Shah was toppled in fourteen months, and how the United States, with one of its largest CIA stations in the world on the ground, missed it entirely. Anderson tells it with the narrative propulsion of a thriller and the analytical rigor of the best foreign correspondence. Essential reading for right now.

Pulitzer Prize

Memoir or Autobiography

MemoirNational Book Award Finalist

Things in Nature Merely Grow

by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li lost two sons — Vincent in 2017, James in 2024, both to suicide — and this book is her attempt to hold a place for James in language. It is not a grief memoir in any conventional sense. It is a philosopher's reckoning with loss, an act of radical acceptance written with devastating precision. One of the most quietly extraordinary books in recent memory.

Pulitzer Prize

General Nonfiction

JournalismSocial Issues

There Is No Place for Us

by Brian Goldstone

Through five Atlanta families, Goldstone documents a crisis that defies the stories we tell ourselves about hard work and reward: people with full-time jobs who cannot keep a roof over their heads. Novelistic in its intimacy, devastating in its implications, and impossible to dismiss — this is the kind of journalism that changes how you see a city, and a country.

Narrative NonfictionHistory

A Flower Traveled in My Blood

by Haley Cohen Gilliland

The extraordinary true story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo — the Argentine grandmothers who became detectives, geneticists, and activists in their search for grandchildren stolen by the junta and given to military families during the dictatorship. Gilliland had unique access to the families at the center of this story, and the result reads like a thriller and lands like a gut punch.

The Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded since 1917 — and this year's list is a reminder of why they still matter. Whether you start with the fiction, the history, or the memoir, you can't go wrong.