The Women’s Prize Shortlist and Other Award-Nominated and Winning Nonfiction

It’s one of my favorite times of year—literary award season! Literary prizes that focus on the previous year’s new releases are now coming out with their longlists, shortlists, and winners for 2025’s best books. 

The Women’s Prize Announces Its Nonfiction Shortlist

Several weeks ago, I shared my love for the Women’s Prize, highlighting their relatively new award in nonfiction. For weeks, book lovers around the world have predicted their picks for the shortlist, and on the 25th of March, they announced the titles moving on to the awards ceremony.

• The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet 
• Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health by Daisy Fancourt 
• Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
• Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska 
• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
• Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century by Ece Temelkuran 

The 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced on April 22nd, and winners of both the fiction and nonfiction prizes will be revealed on June 11th.

National Book Critics Circle Announces the Award Winners for 2025

I am a sucker for a good prize list, but few match my taste like the National Book Critics Circle Awards. So I was delighted to see them announce their winners. For their nonfiction prizes, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao won for nonfiction. A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled by Alex Green won for biography, and Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (one of my favorite memoirs from last year) won for autobiography.

Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian won for criticism. And finally, Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs won the John Leonard Prize. What a year for nonfiction!

Winners of the Weatherford Award for Best Books About Appalachia

Every year, I attend the Appalachian Studies Association’s annual conference and sit excitedly waiting for the winners to be announced for the Weatherford Awards. As it mentions on their website, the “Weatherford Awards honor books deemed as best illuminating the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” They have three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This year, they announced Holler by Denali Sai Nalamalapu (one of my favorite books of 2025) as the winner in nonfiction. They also named two finalists in nonfiction, Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries by Jeremy Jones and Toward Just Transitions: Visions for Regenerative Communities in Appalachia by Kathryn Engle and Shaunna L. Scott.