Reading List · Literary Prizes

Every Fiction and Nonfiction Winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards

No jury reads these books. No panel argues about them. The Goodreads Choice Awards are decided by whoever turns up to vote, and in 2025 that was 7,516,397 votes. The rules name no prize money and no medal — the winner gets a line on the cover and a spike in sales. The fiction category was once decided by five votes, and the nonfiction one, six years earlier, by a hundred and thirty-seven.

By Lisanne Swart · 34 winners since 2009 · Voted, not judged · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 25 September 2026


Every fiction and nonfiction winner · 2009 to 2025 seventeen years, two categories

Click a title to read about that book further down ↓

  1. 2009The HelpKathryn Stockett · fictionColumbineDave Cullen · nonfiction
  2. 2010RoomEmma Donoghue · fictionThe Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksRebecca Skloot · nonfiction
  3. 20111Q84Haruki Murakami · fictionThe Geeks Shall Inherit the EarthAlexandra Robbins · nonfiction
  4. 2012The Casual VacancyJ.K. Rowling · fictionQuietSusan Cain · nonfiction
  5. 2013And the Mountains EchoedKhaled Hosseini · fictionThe Autistic BrainTemple Grandin and Richard Panek · nonfiction
  6. 2014LandlineRainbow Rowell · fictionThe Opposite of LonelinessMarina Keegan · nonfiction
  7. 2015Go Set a WatchmanHarper Lee · fictionModern RomanceAziz Ansari with Eric Klinenberg · nonfiction
  8. 2016Truly Madly GuiltyLiane Moriarty · fictionHamilton: The RevolutionLin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter · nonfiction
  9. 2017Little Fires EverywhereCeleste Ng · fictionHow to Be a BawseLilly Singh · nonfiction
  10. 2018Still MeJojo Moyes · fictionI’ll Be Gone in the DarkMichelle McNamara · nonfiction
  11. 2019The TestamentsMargaret Atwood · fictionGirl, Stop ApologizingRachel Hollis · nonfiction
  12. 2020The Midnight LibraryMatt Haig · fictionStampedJason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi · nonfiction
  13. 2021Beautiful World, Where Are YouSally Rooney · fictionThe Anthropocene ReviewedJohn Green · nonfiction
  14. 2022Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and TomorrowGabrielle Zevin · fictionAtlas of the HeartBrené Brown · nonfiction
  15. 2023YellowfaceR.F. Kuang · fictionPoverty, by AmericaMatthew Desmond · nonfiction
  16. 2024The Wedding PeopleAlison Espach · fictionThe Anxious GenerationJonathan Haidt · nonfiction
  17. 2025My FriendsFredrik Backman · fictionEverything Is TuberculosisJohn Green · nonfiction
  1. Eligible booksPublished 12 Nov 2025 to 10 Nov 2026
  2. Nominees and opening roundNot announced
  3. Final roundNot announced
  4. WinnersNot announced

Goodreads has published the eligibility window for 2026 and nothing else. Over the last five editions the opening round has begun between 11 and 16 November and the winners have been announced between 4 and 8 December, a little earlier each year. This page is updated when the dates are confirmed.

Quick answer

The Goodreads Choice Awards are an annual readers’ vote run by Goodreads, the book-cataloguing site Amazon has owned since 2013. They have run every year since 2009, which makes 2025 the seventeenth edition. There is no jury and no entry: Goodreads builds the ballot from what its members add, rate and review, and members then vote in two rounds in November. In 2025 My Friends by Fredrik Backman took fiction and Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green took nonfiction, out of a record 7,516,397 votes cast across fifteen categories. Fiction and nonfiction are the two broadest categories and both have run in every edition since 2009. All thirty-four of their winners are on this page.

Quick facts about the Goodreads Choice Awards

First awarded
2009; the winners were announced on 8 January 2010
Run by
Goodreads, owned by Amazon since 2013
Decided by
An open vote of registered Goodreads members — no jury, no judges, no submissions
Prize money
None named in the rules. No cash, no medal — a badge on the book’s Goodreads page
Categories
Fifteen since 2023, down from twenty for most of the 2010s and twenty-two in 2011
Non-fiction categories
Three: nonfiction, memoir, history and biography. There were six in 2020
Oldest categories
Fiction and nonfiction have run since the first edition in 2009; memoir and history and biography since 2010
Rounds
Two since 2021: an opening round of twenty nominees, then a final round of ten
How books get on the ballot
Goodreads picks them from its own member data; a nominee needs an average rating of 3.50 or higher
Who can vote
Any registered member, one book per category per round. You do not have to have read it
Votes in 2025
7,516,397, the highest yet, across fifteen categories
Closest result
Five votes, in fiction, 2020
Latest winners
My Friends by Fredrik Backman and Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green, announced 4 December 2025
Won the same category twice
John Green took nonfiction in 2021 and 2025, the only author to do it. Emily Henry has won romance five years running
Next winners
Not yet announced; December 2026 on the pattern of recent years

How this page chooses

Fiction and nonfiction are the two broadest categories on the ballot and both have run in every edition since 2009, so those are the two this page follows all the way through. The timeline at the top has all thirty-four winners, oldest first, and every title in it has its own entry further down the page in the same order. Memoir and history and biography, which started a year later, are listed in full further down, and so are the 2025 winners in every category.

Under each book is a line in red: a margin, another prize, a first, or a link to the relevant list elsewhere on this site. Nothing in it is a verdict on the book. What this page does not do is tell you these are the thirty-four best books of the last seventeen years. They are the thirty-four that the most Goodreads members voted for, which is a different thing, and the page says so where it matters.

All thirty-four winners, 2009 to 2025

Oldest first, and within each year fiction then nonfiction. The line in red under each book is a checkable fact, a margin or a pointer to somewhere else on this site — never a verdict on the book.

The shop links on this page go straight to the shop. They are not affiliate links and I earn nothing if you buy.

2009
PenguinMississippi, 1962

The Help

Kathryn Stockett

Three women in Jackson, Mississippi at the start of the civil rights years: two Black maids who raise white children and clean white houses, and a young white woman who decides to write down what they tell her. The book sold in enormous numbers and has been argued about ever since, largely over who gets to tell whose story.

The first Goodreads Choice Award ever given. That first vote ran over the Christmas holidays and closed on New Year’s Eve; the winners were announced on 8 January 2010.

AmazonBookshop.org
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2009
TwelveTen years after

Columbine

Dave Cullen

Cullen covered the Columbine shooting as a reporter on the day and then spent ten years taking apart what everyone thought they knew about it: the trench coat mafia, the bullied outcasts, the girl who said yes. Almost none of it held up.

The first edition had thirteen categories and neither a memoir nor a history one. Nonfiction covered all of it, and a book about a school shooting won.

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2010
Little, BrownOne room

Room

Emma Donoghue

Jack is five and has lived his whole life in a single room with his mother, who had been held there seven years by the time he was five. He narrates it, so the reader works out what the room is long before he does, and the second half of the novel is about what happens when the world turns out to be bigger than the walls.

It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize the same year, which is rare for a Goodreads winner.

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2010
CrownHeLa

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951 and her cells, taken without her knowledge, are still alive and still being grown in laboratories. Skloot spent a decade with her family, who could not afford health insurance while her cells were being sold around the world.

It won nonfiction and the debut category in the same year. Mockingjay took four that night, including favourite hero and favourite heroine, two prizes that were never given again.

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2011
KnopfTwo moons

1Q84

Haruki Murakami

Tokyo, 1984, or a version of it with two moons in the sky. A fitness instructor who also kills men, a maths teacher writing a novel, a religious cult and a set of rules that nobody explains. Nearly a thousand pages, and the two main characters barely meet.

Published in Japan in three volumes in 2009 and 2010; Knopf brought all three out in English as one book on 25 October 2011, which is the edition that won.

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2011
HyperionOne school year

The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

Alexandra Robbins

Robbins followed seven American high school students for a year — the loner, the gamer, the new girl, the popular one — to argue that the qualities that make you an outsider at seventeen are the ones that pay off at thirty.

The 2011 edition ran twenty-two book categories, the most it has ever had, and drew 638,603 votes.

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2012
Little, BrownA parish council

The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling

A man dies and leaves a seat empty on the parish council of a small English town. The fight over who fills it opens up everything the town would rather not discuss: the estate on its edge, the addicts, the teenagers, the people who run things and the people things are done to.

Her first novel for adults, published five years after the last Harry Potter book. It is also on my list of the best books of 2012.

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2012
CrownIntroverts

Quiet

Susan Cain

The case that Western schools and offices are built for the third of people they suit least, and that the preference for the fast, loud and social is a cultural habit rather than a fact about how good work happens.

It is also on my list of the best books of 2012.

AmazonBookshop.org
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2013
RiverheadAfghanistan

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini

A brother and sister are separated in rural Afghanistan in 1952, and the novel follows what that separation does to the people around them across sixty years and four countries. Each chapter belongs to a different character, and several of them never meet.

His third novel, after The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

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2013
Houghton Mifflin HarcourtFrom the inside

The Autistic Brain

Temple Grandin and Richard Panek

Grandin, who is autistic and has spent her career designing livestock handling systems, goes through what brain imaging and genetics had by then established about autism, and through her own scans, with a science writer at her side.

The 2013 vote drew 1,953,770 ballots, the first year over a million and a half.

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2014
St. Martin’s PressA yellow telephone

Landline

Rainbow Rowell

Georgie McCool stays in Los Angeles to write a television pilot while her husband takes the children to Omaha for Christmas. At her mother’s house she finds an old landline that connects her to her husband in 1998, before they married, and she has to decide what she would tell him.

The 2014 vote was the first to pass three million: 3,317,504 ballots, across twenty categories.

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2014
ScribnerPublished after her death

The Opposite of Loneliness

Marina Keegan

Nine stories and nine essays by a writer who was twenty-two. The title piece was written for the Yale graduation issue of the student paper and went around the world after she died in a car crash five days later.

It won by 137 votes: 19,793 against 19,656 for Randall Munroe’s What If?

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2015
HarperCollinsMaycomb again

Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee

Jean Louise Finch comes home to Maycomb, Alabama in her twenties and finds her father, Atticus, sitting on a citizens’ council. The book was written before To Kill a Mockingbird and reads like a first draft of a different argument, which is either the point or the problem depending on who you ask.

Written before To Kill a Mockingbird and published on 14 July 2015, fifty-five years after it.

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2015
Penguin PressWith a sociologist

Modern Romance

Aziz Ansari with Eric Klinenberg

A comedian and an NYU sociologist run focus groups and read the research on how people find each other now, and what the phone in the middle of it has done to waiting, choosing and settling.

One of only two years in the 2010s when the total vote fell, and the first: 3,007,748 against 3,317,504. The other was 2019.

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2016
Flatiron BooksA barbecue

Truly Madly Guilty

Liane Moriarty

Six adults and three children go to a neighbour’s barbecue in suburban Sydney. Something happens there, and the novel withholds what it was for two hundred pages while showing you what it did to every marriage in the garden.

3,550,346 votes were cast in 2016, when the awards still ran to twenty categories.

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2016
Grand Central52,925 votes

Hamilton: The Revolution

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter

The libretto of the musical with Miranda’s own footnotes on every song, and a running account of how the show was made, from the mixtape he read about Alexander Hamilton on holiday to opening night.

52,925 of the 149,234 votes cast in the category — the largest tally Goodreads has published for a nonfiction winner up to that point; it has stopped publishing them for the later years. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted came fifth that year with 8,242, and won the Pulitzer the following spring.

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2017
Penguin PressShaker Heights

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng

A planned, orderly suburb of Cleveland, a family who have always lived by its rules, and an artist and her daughter who rent a room and do not. A custody case over a Chinese-American baby splits the town, and the novel opens with the family house on fire.

Ng’s second novel. The 2017 vote drew 3,887,950 ballots.

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2017
BallantineFrom YouTube

How to Be a Bawse

Lilly Singh

Fifty short chapters of advice on work, confidence and failure from a Canadian YouTuber who had built an audience of millions before she wrote a word of it.

One of a run of winners who arrived from television and the internet rather than from writing: Aziz Ansari in 2015, Singh in 2017, Rachel Hollis in 2019.

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2018
PenguinNew York

Still Me

Jojo Moyes

The third book about Louisa Clark, who takes a job in New York working for a wealthy couple and finds that the life she has been building for herself and the one she left behind do not fit together as neatly as she hoped.

This is the win critics reach for when they want to make the point about the awards. Ron Charles wrote at the time: “I don’t know any critics who have picked ‘Still Me’ as their favorite book of the year.”

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2018
HarperFinished by others

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark

Michelle McNamara

McNamara spent years on the unsolved Californian rapes and murders of the 1970s and 1980s, and gave the man who did them the name that stuck: the Golden State Killer. She died in 2016 with the book unfinished; her researcher and a colleague completed it.

It took 46,472 of 249,235 votes in the category. Two months after publication, a suspect was arrested.

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2019
Nan A. TaleseGilead, fifteen years on

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood

The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, told by three women: Aunt Lydia, who built much of Gilead and is now writing down what she knows, and two young women on either side of the border who do not know what they are to each other.

It won here by more than fifty thousand votes — 98,291 against 40,081 for the runner-up — and shared the Booker Prize that same autumn with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

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2019
HarperCollins LeadershipSelf-help

Girl, Stop Apologizing

Rachel Hollis

The follow-up to Girl, Wash Your Face: excuses to let go of, behaviours to adopt and skills to acquire, from a writer who built her audience on Instagram.

The 2019 vote drew 4,659,701 ballots.

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2020
VikingWon by five votes

The Midnight Library

Matt Haig

Nora Seed, at the lowest point of her life, finds herself in a library between life and death where every book is a version of her life she did not live. She tries them, one after another, looking for the one that works.

It beat Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People by five votes out of 5,674,480 cast — the narrowest result in the awards’ history, by Goodreads’ own account.

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2020
Little, Brown Books for Young ReadersWritten for teenagers

Stamped

Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

Reynolds rewrites Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning for younger readers, keeping the argument — that racist ideas were invented to justify what was already being done — and losing the academic sentence.

A book for young readers winning the adult category. Kendi took two that year: this and picture books, for Antiracist Baby. Goodreads’ own page credits Reynolds alone.

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2021
Farrar, Straus and GirouxFour people, emailing

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney

Alice, a novelist who has had a breakdown, and Eileen, her oldest friend, write each other long emails about beauty, collapse and whether it is reasonable to care about a novel. Between the emails, the novel watches the two of them and the men they are involved with from the outside, like a camera.

The first year the awards ran without write-ins. Until 2020 a member could vote in the opening round for any eligible book, on the ballot or not; Goodreads dropped that and widened the ballot to twenty books instead.

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2021
DuttonOut of five stars

The Anthropocene Reviewed

John Green

Essays that review parts of the human-centred planet on a five-star scale: Halley’s Comet, Diet Dr Pepper, the QWERTY keyboard, sunsets. It began as a podcast and it is funnier and sadder than the premise suggests.

Green’s first of two wins in this category, and the only author to have won it twice.

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2022
KnopfThirty years

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Gabrielle Zevin

Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital games room, fall out, meet again at university and build video games together for thirty years. It is a novel about collaboration and about the particular kind of love that is not romance, and the games are described well enough to play in your head.

The title is a line from Macbeth. The 2022 vote drew 5,779,854 ballots.

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2022
Random HouseEighty-seven emotions

Atlas of the Heart

Brené Brown

Brown maps eighty-seven emotions and experiences and argues that people cannot navigate what they cannot name — that most of us work with a handful of words for feelings we have dozens of.

The clearest case on this page of the award year not being the publication year: Random House published it on 30 November 2021, just inside the window for the 2022 awards.

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2023
William MorrowOver 200,000 votes

Yellowface

R.F. Kuang

June Hayward steals the unpublished manuscript of a dead friend, publishes it under a name that reads as ambiguously Asian, and narrates the whole thing herself — reasonably, plausibly, and with a logic you can follow all the way down.

It took over 200,000 votes in the category. The same year Goodreads added Romantasy and removed poetry, graphic novels and children’s books. It is also on my list of the best books of 2023.

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2023
CrownNot why, but who

Poverty, by America

Matthew Desmond

Not an account of why poor Americans are poor but of who keeps them there: the subsidies, the zoning, the banking fees and the tax breaks that route money upward, and the people who benefit without noticing.

Desmond had come fifth in this category in 2016 with Evicted, which then won the Pulitzer.

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2024
Henry HoltA hotel in Newport

The Wedding People

Alison Espach

Phoebe checks into a grand hotel in Newport, Rhode Island, intending to end her life, and finds the place booked out for someone else’s week-long wedding. The bride works out why she is there, and the two of them make an arrangement.

Espach’s third novel. The 2024 vote drew 6,261,936 ballots, a record at the time and beaten the year after.

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2024
Penguin PressPhones and childhood

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt

Haidt argues that the collapse in adolescent mental health from around 2012 tracks the arrival of the smartphone and the loss of unsupervised play, and sets out four rules he thinks would reverse it.

He had made a related argument with Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind in 2018.

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2025
AtriaLatest winner

My Friends

Fredrik Backman

A teenager sees a famous painting in a gallery and recognises something in the three small figures on a pier at the edge of it. The novel goes back twenty-five years to the summer a group of friends spent by that water, and forward to what she does with what she finds out.

Backman had lost this category in 2020 by five votes. Goodreads pointed that out when he finally won it, out of a record 7,516,397 votes.

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2025
Crash Course BooksLatest winner

Everything Is Tuberculosis

John Green

Green met a boy called Henry in a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone and went looking for why a curable disease still kills over a million people a year. The answer turns out to be about money and attention rather than medicine.

Green’s second win in this category, the only author to do it, with the first book from an imprint Penguin Random House set up for him.

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How a book actually wins

Nobody enters. Goodreads builds the opening ballot itself, from what its members have been adding, rating and reviewing all year: twenty books in each of fifteen categories, three hundred books in total. A nominee has to hold an average rating of 3.50 or higher when the round opens, only one book per series can stand in a category, and a book can appear in only one genre category — though it may also be nominated for debut novel or audiobook, which is how one title wins twice in a night.

Then it is a vote. Any registered member can cast one vote per category in the opening round, which runs for about a fortnight in November. The top ten in each category go through to a final round of five or six days, everyone votes again, and the winners are announced in the first days of December. You do not have to have read the book. You do not have to have read any of them.

The eligibility window is not a calendar year, which is the detail most write-ups get wrong. For the 2025 awards a book had to be published in the United States, in English, between 13 November 2024 and 11 November 2025. Translations count. That is why a book can win a Goodreads award in a year that is not its publication year, and why the last fortnight of any December is dead time that rolls into the next round.

What has changed since 2009

Three things, and each of them narrowed the prize.

The write-in round is gone. From at least 2012 until 2020 there were three rounds, and in the first of them a member could vote for any eligible book at all, on the ballot or not. The middle round then turned the five books with the most write-in votes in each category into official nominees, whatever their rating, and closed write-ins for good. That was the part of the process a reader could actually push on. It was dropped for the 2021 edition and the opening ballot went from fifteen books to twenty instead.

The categories have been cut. There were thirteen in 2009 and twenty for most of the 2010s. They fell to seventeen in 2021 and to fifteen in 2023, and the 2023 cut was the one people fought over: poetry, graphic novels and children’s and middle-grade books were all removed in the same year that Romantasy was added. The literary agent Faye Bender ran a petition to get children’s books and graphic novels back. Goodreads answered that the categories follow what its members are reading. Neither has returned. Audiobook took a slot in 2024 and humour lost one in the same year, so the count has stayed at fifteen.

And the name changed. The categories used to be called Best Fiction, Best Memoir, Best Horror. They are now Readers’ Favorite Fiction and so on, which is either a small honesty or a small retreat, depending on how you read it.

What the award is, and what it is not

It is not money. Goodreads’ rules name no cash prize and no medal; what happens on the day is that a blog post goes up and a badge appears on the book’s Goodreads page. What the winner gets is visibility, and Goodreads has published figures on what that is worth: when The Nightingale won in 2015, the number of people adding it to a shelf went from about 475 a day to about 9,300 on the day of the announcement, and it reached number one on the New York Times list after forty-three weeks on sale.

It is not judged. That is the point of it and also the whole of the criticism. Because the ballot is built from popularity and decided by popularity, the standing objection is that the results track what was marketed hardest as much as what was read most closely, and the winners do look nothing like a critics’ list. Book Riot, which follows the awards closely, counted that only about eleven per cent of all winners from 2009 to 2024 were authors of colour, that in the first five years the figure was under four per cent, and that the categories cut in 2023 were ones where authors of colour had been better represented.

And it is owned. Goodreads has belonged to Amazon since 2013, so the award with by far the most votes behind it is run by the largest bookseller in the world, on data that bookseller holds. That does not make the result dishonest, and I have seen no evidence that it is. It is worth knowing when you read “Goodreads Choice Award winner” on a cover.

Read it for what it is and it is genuinely useful: the clearest annual picture there is of what a very large number of people actually finished and liked. Just do not read it as a verdict.

Memoir, and history and biography, year by year

Two more non-fiction categories have run almost as long. Neither existed in 2009; both started with the 2010 edition and have run every year since. Memoir was called Memoir & Autobiography until 2023 and has been plain Memoir since. They are listed here rather than given entries of their own, because the two categories above are the ones that go all the way back.

Memoir

2010  Unbearable Lightness, Portia de Rossi
2011  Two Kisses for Maddy, Matthew Logelin
2012  Wild, Cheryl Strayed
2013  I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai
2014  This Star Won’t Go Out, Esther Earl
2015  A Work in Progress, Connor Franta
2016  When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi
2017  What Happened, Hillary Rodham Clinton
2018  Educated, Tara Westover
2019  Over the Top, Jonathan Van Ness
2020  A Promised Land, Barack Obama
2021  Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
2022  I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
2023  The Woman in Me, Britney Spears
2024  The Third Gilmore Girl, Kelly Bishop
2025  The House of My Mother, Shari Franke

History and biography

2010  The Tudors, G.J. Meyer
2011  Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
2012  Elizabeth the Queen, Sally Bedell Smith
2013  Jim Henson: The Biography, Brian Jay Jones
2014  The Romanov Sisters, Helen Rappaport
2015  Dead Wake, Erik Larson
2016  Leonard, William Shatner with David Fisher
2017  The Radium Girls, Kate Moore
2018  The Good Neighbor, Maxwell King
2019  The Five, Hallie Rubenhold
2020  Caste, Isabel Wilkerson
2021  Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe
2022  Bad Gays, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller
2023  The Wager, David Grann
2024  The Bookshop, Evan Friss
2025  How to Kill a Witch, Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi

Two of those agreed with a jury in the same year. Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain each won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction in the year they won the readers’ vote here. Two others were published after their authors had died: Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, and Esther Earl’s This Star Won’t Go Out, which she wrote as a teenager with cancer.

The non-fiction categories that were cut

In 2020 there were six non-fiction or non-fiction-adjacent categories: nonfiction, memoir and autobiography, history and biography, science and technology, food and cookbooks, and humour. There are now three.

Science and technology and food and cookbooks both went after 2020. Humour went after 2023, its last winner being Henry Winkler’s Being Henry. Poetry and graphic novels went after 2022, in the cut that produced the petition.

Food and cookbooks is worth a line on its own, because it shows the shape of the whole prize in miniature. Ree Drummond won it three times, Ina Garten twice and Chrissy Teigen twice; Gwyneth Paltrow took the first edition and Antoni Porowski of Queer Eye the 2019 one. Nine of its ten editions went to people who were on television first and in print second. The same pattern runs through the nonfiction winners above: a comedian in 2015, a YouTuber in 2017, an Instagram self-help writer in 2019. That is not an argument against the prize. It is what a prize measures when it measures how many people voted.

The 2025 winners in all fifteen categories

Announced on 4 December 2025, from 7,516,397 votes — the most the awards have had.

Fiction went to My Friends by Fredrik Backman. Historical fiction to Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Mystery and thriller to Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson. Romance to Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry, her fifth win in that category in five years.

Romantasy and audiobook both went to Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros. Fantasy to Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab. Science fiction to The Compound by Aisling Rawle. Horror to Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix.

Debut novel went to Alchemised by SenLinYu, a rewritten Harry Potter fan fiction that placed second in Romantasy on the same night. Young adult fantasy and science fiction to Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, and young adult fiction to Fake Skating by Lynn Painter.

Nonfiction went to Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green. Memoir to The House of My Mother by Shari Franke, and history and biography to How to Kill a Witch by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi.

Frequently asked questions about the Goodreads Choice Awards

What is the Goodreads Choice Award?

An annual readers’ vote run by Goodreads, held every year since 2009. There is no jury and no submission process: Goodreads assembles the ballot from its own member data and registered members vote in two rounds in November. Goodreads calls them “the only major book awards chosen by readers”.

Who won the Goodreads Choice Award for fiction in 2025?

Fredrik Backman, for My Friends. The winners were announced on 4 December 2025 from a record 7,516,397 votes across fifteen categories.

When are the 2026 Goodreads Choice Awards announced?

Goodreads has not announced the dates. All it has published is the eligibility window: books published between 12 November 2025 and 10 November 2026. Over the last five editions the opening round has begun between 11 and 16 November and the winners have been announced between 4 and 8 December, a little earlier each year. Early December 2026 is the pattern rather than a promise.

How does voting in the Goodreads Choice Awards work?

In two rounds. Goodreads nominates twenty books in each of fifteen categories, and any registered member can vote for one book per category in the opening round, which runs about a fortnight in November. The top ten in each category go through to a final round of five or six days. You do not have to have read the book you vote for.

Is there prize money for the Goodreads Choice Award?

No. The rules name no cash prize and no medal. The winner gets a badge on the book’s Goodreads page and a line on the cover. Goodreads has published figures showing what that visibility is worth in sales: after The Nightingale won in 2015, daily shelf additions rose from about 475 to about 9,300 on announcement day.

Why were categories removed from the Goodreads Choice Awards?

Goodreads cut poetry, graphic novels and children’s and middle-grade books for the 2023 edition while adding Romantasy, and said the categories follow what its members are reading. The literary agent Faye Bender ran a petition to have children’s books and graphic novels reinstated; neither has come back. In 2024 audiobook was added and humour dropped, so the count stayed at fifteen, against twenty for most of the 2010s.

Has a Goodreads Choice winner ever won a serious literary prize?

Yes, and in the same season. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for fiction by more than fifty thousand votes and shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. It is the exception rather than the pattern.

What was the closest Goodreads Choice Award ever?

The 2020 fiction category. Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library beat Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People by five votes out of 5,674,480 cast. Backman won the category himself five years later with My Friends.

Are the Goodreads Choice Awards just a popularity contest?

Largely, and Goodreads does not pretend otherwise — the ballot is built from what members add and rate, and the result is an open vote in which nobody has to have read anything. That makes it a good record of what a very large number of readers finished and liked, and a poor guide to what will still be read in twenty years. Both things are true at once.

Where should I start with the Goodreads Choice winners?

Every fiction and nonfiction winner has a full entry on this page, and the memoir and history winners are listed in full. If you want prizes decided by people who have read the books, my pages on the National Book Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction cover every winner.

Footnotes

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.

From the bookshelf
“Decided by voting open to all members of Goodreads, the Goodreads Choice Awards are the only major book awards chosen by readers.”

— Goodreads, on its own prize

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