The year in prizes
2026 Book Award Winners
11 prize categories represented
The literary year is still in progress. Daniel Kraus won the Pulitzer for Angel Down, a First World War horror novel, Jill Lepore took the history prize for We the People, Juliana Spahr won the poetry prize for Ars Poeticas, Virginia Evans won the Women's Prize for The Correspondent, and Renée Watson won the Newbery Medal for All the Blues in the Sky.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Angel Down
France, autumn 1918, the Meuse Argonne offensive. Private First Class Cyril Bagger, a bishop's son turned card sharp who has been working burial...
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The Correspondent
Sybil Van Antwerp is seventy three, divorced, and living alone in Maryland, and she runs her life by mail. She writes to her brother Felix, to her...
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Small Scale Sinners
Small Scale Sinners is Mahreen Sohail's first book, twelve stories published as a paperback original by A Public Space Books in September 2025....
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There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Brian Goldstone's subject is the working homeless: people with jobs, often full time jobs, who cannot keep a roof over their families. He follows...
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We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
Jill Lepore's We the People follows the history of the United States Constitution from its drafting in Philadelphia in 1787 through more than two...
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Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
A double biography of Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, the two daughters of Philip Schuyler's Hudson Valley dynasty who mattered most to Alexander...
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Ars Poeticas
The title puts a plural on Horace's Ars Poetica, the ancient poem about how to write poems, and the book is built from a sequence of long poems...
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The Everlasting
Owen Mallory knows what a hero looks like. He has spent years studying Una Everlasting, the knight whose service to Queen Yvanne helped create the...
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The Big Empty
Traci Beller was thirteen when her father Tommy, a heating contractor beloved by everyone including the daughter who worshipped him, drove out on a...
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All the Blues in the Sky
Thirteen year old Sage is grieving her best friend, who died in a hit and run on Sage's own birthday, and this novel in verse follows the months...
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Fireworks
Two children spend a Fourth of July together in a city neighborhood, and Matthew Burgess's text follows their day in order rather than building...
What Shaped 2026
This page fills in as the year goes on. The American prizes announced early in the calendar are here already, since the Newbery and Caldecott are given in January and the Edgars in the spring and the Pulitzers, including Amanda Vaill's biography Pride and Pleasure and Brian Goldstone's There Is No Place for Us, in May, while the Booker, the National Book Awards and the Nobel all land in the autumn and are not yet decided. Lepore's constitutional history arrived in a period when the document's meaning was under argument in American courts and politics, which is the condition it has usually been in.