Carnegie Medal 2016: Complete list of winners

The 2016 Carnegie Medal announced two remarkable works that bookended the year’s most compelling storytelling—one a sweeping novel about identity and deception in the aftermath of war, the other a deeply personal memoir woven together with striking photographs. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer claimed the fiction prize, a sprawling, genre-bending debut that had already made waves across the literary world with its unreliable narrator and unflinching examination of the Vietnam War and its consequences. On the nonfiction side, Sally Mann’s Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs brought readers into the artist’s interior world, blending luminous images with prose that explores motherhood, mortality, and the act of creation itself.

The Carnegie Medal, one of the most respected honors in American letters, has long championed works of exceptional literary merit across fiction and nonfiction categories. These 2016 winners embodied that tradition while pushing readers into uncomfortable territory—whether through Nguyen’s morally complex anti-hero or Mann’s unflinching camera. The choices reflected the award’s commitment to recognizing ambitious, artistically significant work that resonates beyond the publishing season, cementing both authors’ places in the literary conversation for years to come.

Below, discover more details about the full slate of 2016 Carnegie Medal honorees and what made this year’s selections particularly resonant:

Fiction

• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nonfiction

• Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann