Subscribe to our newsletter
Find The New Yorker’s announcement here.
The National Book Foundation today announced the Longlist for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction with The New Yorker. The Finalists in all five categories will be revealed on Tuesday, October 7 with the New York Times; Winners will be announced live at the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 19, 2025.
The 2025 Nonfiction Longlist features biography, criticism, memoir, reportage, science writing, and more, and all of the Longlisted authors are newcomers to the National Book Awards. This year’s list includes an Emmy nominee, a Marshall Scholar, a Knight-Wallace Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow. The Longlisted authors have been previously honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting, the Oregon Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the Washington State Book Award, the Windham–Campbell Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and more. Their work has appeared in A Public Space, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Forbes, The Guardian, Guernica, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, TIME Magazine, and The Washington Post, among others.
Three Longlisted titles focus on the individuals and communities behind extraordinary historical movements from the 19th century to present day. Iranian journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy offer a powerful exploration of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement—an uprising sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jîna Amini, a young Kurdish woman who died in police custody after her arrest for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s dress code. For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising is a cross-border collaboration that sheds light on the power of multiethnic and multigenerational sisterhood, and how journalists, protesters, and everyday people can stand in defiance of oppression. Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy tells the stories of the women engineers, scientists, academics, and doctors who outnumbered men in the Russian workforce during the 20th century, alongside the stories of the revolutionary feminists leading powerful movements today. Journalist Julia Ioffe returns to Russia nearly 20 years after her family fled the Soviet Union, and blends reporting, history, and memoir to illustrate how the story of modern Russia—across times of war and revolution—is interwoven with the stories of countless Soviet and Russian women. Caleb Gayle focuses on the life of Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and rising political figure, who attempted to establish a state governed by and for Black people within the United States. McCabe set his sights on Oklahoma, a state that—after the Civil War and Reconstruction era—was already the home to Indigenous people who were forcibly displaced as a result of the Indian Removal Act. Drawing from research and reporting, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State narrates the political context, diverging business interests, and racism that dismantled McCabe’s dream of Black liberation.
In the face of death, destruction, and disenfranchisement, three Longlisters consider what it means to keep living, to keep writing, and to keep bearing witness. The novelist Yiyun Li remembers the lives of her two sons, James and Vincent, who both died by suicide only a few years apart. Li’s memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow contends with loss and unbearable grief while choosing to embrace radical acceptance—that both of her children chose death, and that she will continue to live despite the “abyss” in the aftermath. Journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad centers his attention on American and European complicity in the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people, arguing that mass apathy towards immense suffering is leading to innumerable fractures across Western societies. In his debut work of nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad grapples with his realization that the Western promise of freedom for all was never truly meant to be inclusive, and that continuing to ignore state-sanctioned violence will one day be met by a powerful reckoning—not just for individuals, but for entire societies. To examine another of Western society’s most vulnerable populations, Claudia Rowe explores the American foster care system through interviews with current and former foster youth—alongside psychologists, advocates, and judges. Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care interrogates the inner workings of a system that contributes to mass incarceration and calls for urgent reform.
Two 2025 Nonfiction Longlisters defy genre to make sense of their own perspective and of the world around them. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ben Ratliff reflects on and takes note of the music he listens to during each of his near-daily runs—ranging from hardcore punk to string quartets, from DJ sets to soul, and more—while observing New York in lockdown and deepening his appreciation for music along the way. Ratliff merges criticism, autobiography, and philosophy in Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening, a meditation on music, the body in motion, and a radically changing world. Experimental artist, filmmaker, and writer, Lana Lin, uses the literary form invented by Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to tell the story of her 25-year queer partnership and artistic collaboration. Narrated through the eyes of her partner, readers follow Lan Thao from her youth in Vietnam, her years in Canada after the Vietnam War, and the couple’s first encounter in New York City in The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam—an exploration of cancer, queerness, anti-Asian hate, and the delights and challenges that have connected the artists’ lives for decades.
To begin to heal human-wrought devastation, two Longlisted authors consider our relationships to the land with scientific rigor and heart. Anthropologist and wildland firefighter Jordan Thomas narrates a six-month megafire season in When it All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World. Blending ecology, federal forestry, and Indigenous history alongside an investigation of the fire industrial complex, Thomas brings readers to the front lines of the climate crisis. In the early 2000s, Helen Whybrow and her partner embarked on a journey to restore a farmhouse built in 1777, and the family begins to interlace their lives with the two hundred acres of land. Set in Vermont’s Green Mountains, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life shares the story of Whybrow’s working life as a shepherd tending to a flock of Icelandic sheep, exploring the interconnectedness of the natural world, and encouraging us all to be more attentive to the world around us.
Publishers submitted a total of 652 books for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The judges for Nonfiction are Heather Kathleen Moody Hall, Tiya Miles (Chair), Raj Patel, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Eli Saslow. Judges’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and Board of Directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential. For more information about the 76th National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner and to register for the livestream, please visit nationalbook.org/awards.
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Knopf / Penguin Random House
Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Julia Ioffe, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy
Ecco / HarperCollins Publishers
Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising
Pantheon Books / Penguin Random House
Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers
Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam
Dorothy, a publishing project
Ben Ratliff, Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening
Graywolf Press
Claudia Rowe, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care
Abrams Press / Abrams
Jordan Thomas, When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World
Riverhead Books / Penguin Random House
Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life
Milkweed Editions
