The 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced, celebrating exceptional American writing across genres including journalism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. This year's winners including a moving graphic memoir, a surprising story of two rival 18th century scientists and the latest, critically acclaimed novel from Percival Everett.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
James
Percival Everett
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he flees to nearby Jackson's Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town.
So begins a dangerous and transcendent journey along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most life-changing odyssey of them all …
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause
Benjamin Nathans
Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world's imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorised public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century.
Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, Benjamin Nathans reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography
Every Living Thing
Jason Roberts
The dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life.
In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic, ever-changing swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible – how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species?
Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet, and on humanity itself.
Due for publication in Australia on 8 July 2025.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir
Feeding Ghosts
Tessa Hulls
In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa's grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival – then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.
Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away.
Feeding Ghosts is Tessa's homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.
Due for publication in Australia on 19 August 2025.
Other winners include Marie Howe, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Kathleen DuVal and Edda L Fields-Black who jointly won the Pulitzer Prize for History. You can read more about these books and the other 2025 prize winners on the Pulitzer Prize website, or discover previous winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction here.
