Columbia University has announced the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes, awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. The 2025 Pulitzer Prize winning books are:
History
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Random House)
A panoramic portrait of Native American nations and communities over a thousand years, a vivid and accessible account of their endurance, ingenuity and achievement in the face of conflict and dispossession.
History
Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War by Edda L. Fields-Black (Oxford University Press)
A richly-textured and revelatory account of a slave rebellion that brought 756 enslaved people to freedom in a single day, weaving military strategy and family history with the transition from bondage to freedom.
Biography
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts (Random House)
A beautifully written double biography of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, 18th century contemporaries who devoted their lives to identifying and describing nature’s secrets, and who continue to influence how we understand the world.
Memoir/Autobiography
Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.
General Nonfiction
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans (Princeton University Press)
A prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.
Fiction
James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
An accomplished reconsideration of “Huckleberry Finn” that gives agency to Jim to illustrate the absurdity of racial supremacy and provide a new take on the search for family and freedom.
Poetry
New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe (W. W. Norton & Company)
A collection drawn from decades of work that mines the day-to-day modern experience for evidence of our shared loneliness, mortality and holiness.
About the Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer Prizes were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher, who left money to Columbia University upon his death in 1911. A portion of his bequest was used to found the School of Journalism in 1912 and establish the Pulitzer Prizes, which were first awarded in 1917.
The 18-member Pulitzer Board is composed of leading journalists or news executives from media outlets across the U.S., as well as five academics or persons in the arts. The dean of Columbia’s journalism school and the administrator of the prizes are non-voting members. The chair rotates annually to the most senior member or members.