Award-Winning Nonfiction Books of 2023

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction was awarded to two Washington Post reporters for their examination of the life and death of George Floyd, whose killing ignited protests against police brutality and racial injustice across the United States.

Historian Ned Blackhawk won this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction with this sweeping American history that recognizes the central role of Native Americans in the country’s evolution.

This "groundbreaking work of sensory biology and animal behavior" by The Atlantic's celebrated science writer got top nonfiction honors from the American Library Association.

A journalist’s dissection of the complex term “latino” garnered top honors in the nonfiction category, with The Atlantic praising a book that “engages in contemporary debates and issues, such as how Latinos have related to Blackness and indigeneity, the question of why some Latinos choose to identify as white, and the political conservatism of certain Latino communities.”

The National Book Critics Circle awarded its nonfiction prize to this riveting cultural history of Method acting, from Stanislavski's Russia to Hollywood's golden age, which features iconic figures like Marlon Brando and Marylin Monroe.

This coming-of-age story about a queer Muslim immigrant garnered the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize for nonfiction, with Roxane Gay calling it a “beautiful, exquisitely written memoir [that is] as revolutionary now in its vulnerability [and] honesty as the gender explorations in Stone Butch Blues were in 1993.”

This year’s prize, which celebrates outstanding nonfiction that presents insightful perspectives on the world to a broader audience, went to a gripping account of the 2016 wildfire that devastated a booming Canadian oil city.

Jurors awarded this moving and carefully researched account of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution by the Guardian’s former China correspondent, which features rare first-person accounts from people who lived through that brutal period of Chinese history.

The 2023 edition of this prestigious prize, which celebrates books combining excellence in research with readability, went to an important account of how people resisted the Third Reich in Nazi-occupied Europe.

This poet’s innovative memoir about grief, identity, and resilience won both the Lambda Literary Awards for Nonfiction and the PEN Open Book Award this year.