May 5, 2025, 3:46pm
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.