Reading List · Fiction and nonfiction
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction were established in 2012 by the American Library Association with a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. They were the first ALA awards for single adult books, chosen by a seven-member committee of librarians, Booklist reviewers and booksellers. Each year one fiction and one nonfiction book received a medal and US$5,000. In March 2026 the ALA announced that the 2026 medals would be the last supported by Carnegie Corporation, putting the awards on hiatus.
By Lisanne Swart · 29 medals, 2012–2026 · Fiction and nonfiction · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
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Quick answer
The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence are two annual awards from the American Library Association, one for fiction and one for nonfiction, given since 2012. The 2026 medals went to A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li. The awards went on hiatus after the 2026 cycle.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every winner for Fiction and Nonfiction, all 30 of them. The latest 29 have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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Gina Moynihan, 32, begins an affair with Seán Vallely, a married father, during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom. Both marriages come apart, and Seán’s daughter Evie, not yet thirteen, becomes caught up in the consequences.
Shortlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction.
A biography of Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, a minor German princess who became Empress Catherine II of Russia, covering her marriage to the heir Peter, her seizure of the throne and her reign.
Massie won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Peter the Great: His Life and World.
Dell Parsons, looking back as an older man, recalls the year he turned fifteen, when his parents were arrested for robbing a bank and he was sent to Saskatchewan to live with Arthur Remlinger, a man with a violent streak.
The second winner of the Carnegie Medal for fiction, awarded in 2013.
A biography of the photographer Edward Curtis by the journalist Timothy Egan, following Curtis’s life and the making of the photographs that the book’s subtitle calls immortal.
Egan won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Worst Hard Time, about the Dust Bowl.
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother, and leaves carrying Carel Fabritius’s painting The Goldfinch. The novel traces the troubled years after.
Won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was filmed in 2019.
A history of the Progressive Era told through the friendship and later rivalry of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and the McClure’s magazine journalists, among them Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, who investigated the trusts.
Named a 2013 Booklist Editors’ Choice for adult books.
Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a blind French girl sheltering in Saint-Malo with her great-uncle, and Werner Pfennig, a German orphan trained for his skill with radios, are drawn together during the 1944 siege of the town.
Won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a Netflix limited series in 2023.
Stevenson’s memoir of defending poor and marginalised clients, centred on his work to overturn the wrongful murder conviction of Walter McMillian, and including a short history of the Equal Justice Initiative he founded.
Filmed in 2019 by Destin Daniel Cretton, with Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson.
An unnamed communist mole inside the South Vietnamese army tells his story as a forced confession, from the fall of Saigon to exile in Los Angeles, a film shoot in the Philippines and a return to Vietnam.
Won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became an HBO miniseries in 2024.
The photographer Sally Mann’s illustrated memoir, drawing on boxes of family papers, recalls her childhood on a Virginia farm, her parents, her early marriage and decades of work, including the controversy over Immediate Family.
A finalist for the National Book Award.
Cora, an enslaved woman on a Georgia plantation, escapes with a fellow captive, Caesar, on a literal railway running underground across the South, pursued by the slave catcher Ridgeway.
Won the 2016 National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Set in some of Milwaukee’s poorest neighbourhoods during and after the 2008 financial crisis, the book follows eight families struggling to pay rent, many of them facing eviction.
Won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
In 1930s and wartime Brooklyn, Anna Kerrigan’s father works secretly for the gangster Dexter Styles, then vanishes. Anna becomes one of the first women divers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and seeks out Styles.
Longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction and named one of Time’s ten best novels of 2017.
In 1980s Chicago, gallery worker Yale Tishman pursues a major art acquisition as AIDS devastates his friends. In 2015 Paris, Fiona, whose life was shaped by the epidemic, searches for her estranged daughter.
Also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Laymon’s memoir of his relationship with his mother, who taught him to love reading but beat him to prepare him for a racist world, and of his struggles with food and gambling.
Laymon received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.
A documentarian, her husband and their two children drive from New York to Arizona, where he plans a sound project about the Apache. She becomes absorbed in the case of a friend’s daughters, asylum seekers held in federal custody.
Won the 2020 Rathbones Folio Prize and the 2021 Dublin Literary Award.
A history of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine and what followed it, drawing on eyewitness interviews that the author, Adam Higginbotham, conducted over more than a decade.
Some of the documents Higginbotham used had only recently been declassified.
In 1969 Brooklyn, Cuffy ‘Sportcoat’ Lambkin, a hard-drinking church deacon, shoots a young drug dealer in public at the Cause Houses project, setting off a chain of events involving the church, gangsters, police and residents.
Also won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
Prompted by a humpback whale stranded on a beach near her home in Australia, Giggs combines natural history, philosophy and science to ask what whales reveal about the oceans, from whale song to plastic pollution.
Won the 2020 Western Australian Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer.
In the late 1800s, Ming Tsu escapes forced labour on the Central Pacific Railway to hunt down the men who beat him, jailed him and took his wife Ada, joined by a blind clairvoyant and a travelling magic troupe.
Lin, a debut novelist, was 25 when he won, the youngest writer to receive the medal.
Essays on Black performance in music, film, television and everyday life, from Soul Train and Aretha Franklin to Whitney Houston and Beyoncé, taking their title from a 1963 remark by Josephine Baker.
A National Book Award finalist and winner of the Gordon Burn Prize.
The regulars at an underground public pool are scattered when a crack appears and it closes. One of them, Alice, a retired lab technician with dementia, drifts back to the Japanese American incarceration camp where she spent the war.
Like Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, much of it is narrated in the first-person plural.
Ed Yong’s 2022 book explores how animals perceive the world through their many senses, showing that a great number of creatures experience realities that people cannot directly access.
Also won the 2023 Royal Society Science Book Prize.
In July 1962, four-year-old Ruthie disappears while her Mi’kmaq family is picking blueberries in Maine. Her brother Joe was the last to see her; in Maine, a girl named Norma grows up sensing her parents hide something.
Peters’s debut novel; she is a writer of Mi’kmaq and settler ancestry.
An investigation of the 2018 crash in which Jennifer and Sarah Hart killed themselves and the six children they had adopted from two Texas families, centring the children’s birth families and the foster care system.
Also won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
A retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the enslaved man who flees with Huck, presented as a well-read man who plays the role white society expects of him.
Won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Fedarko and his friend, photographer Pete McBride, attempt to traverse the length of the Grand Canyon on foot, about 750 miles with no continuous trail, an effort that took more than a year.
McBride, Fedarko’s companion on the walk, is a National Geographic photographer.
In a near-future Kolkata facing worsening climate crises, Ma, Dadu and two-year-old Mishti are spending a last week in the city before leaving for Michigan when Ma’s purse, holding irreplaceable documents, is stolen.
Shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction; Majumdar’s second novel after A Burning.
Yiyun Li writes about the deaths of her two sons, Vincent in 2017 at sixteen and James in 2024 at nineteen, and about the limits of language in the face of that loss.
Also won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography; Li won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2006.
Each autumn the committee released a longlist of up to 50 titles, named three fiction and three nonfiction finalists in November, and announced the two winners in January. The committee of seven was appointed each year and included one American Booksellers Association member, three Booklist editors or contributors and three members of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA).
The medal year is the year of the award, so books are generally from the previous year’s publishing. Winners received US$5,000; the two remaining finalists in each category were also honoured. Several winners also won the Pulitzer Prize, including The Goldfinch, All the Light We Cannot See, The Sympathizer, The Underground Railroad and James.
In 2018 Sherman Alexie was named winner of the nonfiction medal for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me but declined it amid sexual misconduct allegations. The ALA said it acknowledged his decision and would not award the nonfiction medal that year; the fiction medal went to Jennifer Egan for Manhattan Beach.
On 30 March 2026 the ALA announced that the 2026 medals would mark the end of Carnegie Corporation’s support, which had funded the awards since their creation. The ALA said it hoped to find a new sponsor in the coming year but gave no date for a further cycle.
Two annual American Library Association awards, one for fiction and one for nonfiction, created in 2012 with funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Megha Majumdar won the fiction medal for A Guardian and a Thief, and Yiyun Li won the nonfiction medal for Things in Nature Merely Grow.
The ALA announced in March 2026 that the 2026 medals would be the last supported by Carnegie Corporation; the awards are on hiatus while it seeks a new sponsor.
Sherman Alexie declined the medal amid sexual misconduct allegations, and the ALA chose not to award it that year.
Each winning author receives US$5,000.
A seven-member committee appointed each year, made up of Booklist editors or contributors, RUSA members and an American Booksellers Association member.
Finalists were named in November and winners in January, with the medals presented in June at the ALA Annual Conference.
In 2012, Anne Enright won for The Forgotten Waltz and Robert K. Massie for Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.
Winner list last verified 28 October 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
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