Pulitzer Prizes 2025: Complete list of winners

The Pulitzer Prizes have crowned their 2025 honorees, and this year’s selections showcase the extraordinary breadth of American letters—from graphic memoir to Civil War history to contemporary drama. Among the standouts are Percival Everett’s James, which claimed the Fiction prize for its audacious reimagining of American literature’s most troubling classic, and Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems, recognizing her decades of luminous, unflinching work. The Pulitzer Prizes, which have been distinguishing the year’s finest writing since 1917, revealed a year of particularly strong nonfiction offerings: Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause traces the Soviet dissident movement’s complex history, while two history prizes went to groundbreaking works on Black freedom and Native American sovereignty. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s drama Purpose rounds out the creative winners, signaling the prize committee’s continued investment in theatrical innovation.

What’s particularly striking about this year’s selections is how many winners center previously marginalized or overlooked narratives—whether it’s Edda L. Fields-Black’s investigation of Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Raid, Kathleen DuVal’s millennia-spanning Native Nations, or Tessa Hulls’s graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, which brings illustrated storytelling into the Pulitzer conversation. The 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners collectively suggest a literary establishment increasingly committed to expanding whose stories get told and how they’re told, even as they celebrate established voices like Howe and Roberts. Below, explore the complete list of Pulitzer Prize winners across all categories and discover what makes each year’s selections such a compelling snapshot of contemporary writing.