Reading List · Literary Prizes
Every year since 2014 the Kirkus Prize has gone to three books at once: one novel or story collection, one work of non-fiction and one book for young readers, each worth $50,000. Nobody enters it. The only books that can win are the ones that already got a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. That is how a picture book about a boy in a barbershop and a novel about a Florida reform school ended up on the same list.
By Lisanne Swart · 36 winners since 2014 · Fiction, non-fiction, young readers · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
Click a title to read about that book further down ↓
The six finalists in each category are out, and the three winners are announced on 7 October 2026 at a ceremony in New York. This page is updated when they are.
Quick answer
The Kirkus Prize is an American book prize given each year since 2014 by the review magazine Kirkus Reviews, in three categories: fiction, non-fiction and young readers’ literature. Each winner gets $50,000. Books cannot be entered; every book that received a Kirkus Star, the magazine’s starred review, is automatically eligible. There have been 36 winners. The latest are Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip, Scott Anderson’s King of Kings and Thao Lam’s Everybelly (2025). The 2026 winners follow on 7 October.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top has every winner, year by year, in all three categories. Every title in it has its own entry further down the page, in the same order, so there is nothing to choose between.
Under each book is a line of plain fact about the book or its author — another prize, a first, how it was made — and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first, and within each year fiction, then non-fiction, then young readers. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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Three young anthropologists meet on the Sepik River in New Guinea in 1933: a famous American woman, her difficult husband and a lonely Englishman who has been working there for years. What happens between them matters as much to them as the work.
The three are loosely based on Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson.
Chast’s drawn memoir of her elderly parents’ last years in their Brooklyn apartment and afterwards: the falls, the move into care, the money running out, and a daughter who never got on easily with her mother.
It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography.
A picture book set out as a mail-order catalogue for a world where birds have died out: readers can order the beaks, wings, legs and feathers and assemble a bird of their own.
Samworth both wrote and illustrated it.
Four friends who met at college make their lives in New York over three decades. The novel narrows to one of them, Jude, a brilliant lawyer whose childhood abuse he cannot speak about and cannot leave behind.
It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015.
Written as a letter to his teenage son, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States, from Coates’s boyhood in Baltimore to Howard University and the police killing of a friend.
It also won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2015.
One harmonica passes between three children in the years around the Second World War: Friedrich in Germany, Mike in Pennsylvania and Ivy in California. Each of them is in trouble, and each of their stories is left open until the end.
It was a Newbery Honor book in 2016.
Henry Forge turns his family’s Kentucky farm over to breeding racehorses, with his daughter Henrietta. When Allmon Shaughnessy, a young Black man just out of prison, comes to work as a groom, the family’s history and the history of the state come due, around a horse called Hellsmouth.
It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017.
Faludi had barely been in touch with her father for years when, at seventy-six, her father wrote to tell her that she had had gender reassignment surgery and was now Stefánie. Faludi goes to see her in Budapest, and the book follows what she finds there.
Faludi won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1991.
Genie and his older brother Ernie leave Brooklyn to spend a summer with their grandparents in rural Virginia. Genie, who has a notebook full of questions, finds out that his grandfather is blind, and that there is a lot more nobody has told him.
Jason Reynolds was named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2020.
A first collection of stories set in Nigeria and the United States: mothers and daughters, a woman who makes a child out of hair, and a world where grief can be taken away by mathematics.
Arimah won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2019.
A history of the United States told from the water: the Gulf of Mexico, its fish, birds, beaches and oil, and what four centuries of people have done to it.
It also won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2018.
In a near future where most people have lost the ability to dream, Indigenous people are hunted for their bone marrow, which still holds it. Frenchie, a Métis teenager, travels north through the woods with a small group trying to stay alive.
It also won the Governor General’s Literary Award for young people’s literature in Canada.
Candace Chen works in Bible production for a publisher in Manhattan. When a fever spreads that leaves people repeating their old routines until they die, she keeps going to the office, and then joins a group of survivors heading for a place called the Facility.
It was Ling Ma’s first novel.
Essays on American politics and language written around the 2016 election: on police killings, gentrification, climate change, and what happens when things are not called by their names.
Solnit is also the author of the essay “Men Explain Things to Me”.
A picture book about a Black boy getting a haircut at the barbershop, and how he feels when he walks out. It is illustrated by Gordon C. James.
It was both a Newbery Honor and a Caldecott Honor book in 2018.
Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager in Tallahassee who believes in Martin Luther King, is sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school where boys are beaten and some disappear. The school is based on the real Dozier School in Florida.
It also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2020. Whitehead is a fiction finalist again in 2026.
A memoir of growing up Black and gay in Texas, of his relationship with his mother, and of the men he met along the way.
Saeed Jones is also a poet; his first book was the collection Prelude to Bruise.
Jordan Banks wants to go to art school, but his parents send him to an expensive private school where he is one of the few Black students in seventh grade. Told in comics.
It became the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal, in 2020.
Edie, twenty-three and broke, starts seeing an older married man, and ends up living in his house in New Jersey with his wife and their adopted daughter, who is Black, like her.
It was Leilani’s first novel.
Essays on what is left of the American dream after the Obama years and the 2016 election, and on what it would take to build something better.
His first book was Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching.
A picture book in which a young Black boy says who he is: smart, funny, a friend, a son, and every good thing. Illustrated by Gordon C. James.
It made Barnes the only author to win the Kirkus Prize twice, both times with Gordon C. James as illustrator.
In a world that has come apart ecologically, a teenage girl called Khristen goes looking for her mother and finds a lakeside resort where a group of elderly people are planning to strike back at those who wrecked it.
It was Joy Williams’s first novel in more than twenty years.
A memoir of growing up Black and queer in rural Ohio, of addiction and of getting out, woven around Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool”.
It was Brian Broome’s first book.
The true story of the twelve boys and their football coach who were trapped by floodwater in the Tham Luang cave in Thailand in 2018, and of the divers who got them out.
It was both a Newbery Honor and a Sibert Honor book in 2021.
A Wall Street fortune made in the 1920s, told four times: as a novel, as the financier’s own memoir, as the memory of the woman who helped him write it, and as the diary of his wife. Each version undoes the one before.
It shared the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023.
Essays about scent, memory and South Asian history, by a Bangladeshi American writer who is also a perfumer, moving between family, desire and history.
Tanaïs runs a perfume and beauty house under the same name.
Three young women from different countries share a house in Tokyo for a year: Nao, who grew up in America and wants to find her Japanese side, Hyejung from Korea and Tina from Singapore. Told in comics.
Becker drew George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy.
In 1972 a skeleton is found at the bottom of a well in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The novel goes back to the 1920s and 1930s and the neighbourhood of Chicken Hill, where Jewish and Black families lived side by side, and a store run by a Jewish woman called Chona.
McBride won the National Book Award in 2013 for The Good Lord Bird.
A book written to young Latino readers about the word “Latino”: where it comes from, what it covers, and the myths about migration and race that come with it.
Tobar was part of the Los Angeles Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1992 riots.
Twenty-one visual essays about parts of American history that textbooks leave out, from Hawaiian annexation to forced sterilisation and urban renewal, made from collage, photographs, maps and handwriting.
Aberg-Riger designed a typeface that looks like her handwriting for the book.
The story of Huckleberry Finn told by Jim, the enslaved man who runs away with Huck down the Mississippi, and who in private speaks very differently from the way he speaks to white people.
It also won the National Book Award in 2024 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025.
The space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven on board. The book follows the crew, the engineers who warned about the seals, and the decisions that led to the launch.
Higginbotham is also the author of Midnight in Chernobyl.
Ian Gray, a teenager in rural Vermont, has quit basketball to work and look after his mother, who is addicted to opioids, and to keep their house. He takes in a stray dog he calls Gather, and when things go wrong the two of them run.
It was Cadow’s first novel, and a finalist for the National Book Award in 2023.
In the summer of 1998 sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein starts training at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, and then one night he disappears. More than ten years later his uncle gets a tip, and the search pulls in a whole city of characters.
It was Schaefer’s first novel.
The fall of the Shah of Iran and the revolution of 1979, and the American misjudgements that went with it, from the embassy in Tehran to the White House.
Anderson is also the author of Lawrence in Arabia.
A girl called Maddie spends a day at the public swimming pool looking at bellies: big and small, tattooed, scarred, pregnant and muscled. Made in cut-paper collage.
Thao Lam both wrote and illustrated it.
Kirkus Reviews has reviewed books ahead of publication since the 1930s, and gives a star to the ones it rates most highly. When it set up its prize in 2014, it made the star the only way in: publishers do not submit books, and there is no entry fee. Every starred book published between November and October is eligible, including self-published ones.
From those, Kirkus editors narrow the field, juries choose six finalists in each category, and the three winners are named at a ceremony in the autumn. The first was held in Austin, Texas; the 2025 and 2026 ceremonies are in New York.
The young readers’ category puts picture books, middle-grade novels and books for teenagers in one race, and the winners show it: four picture books, including both of Derrick Barnes’s, two graphic novels, a true story of a cave rescue and a novel about a boy and his dog in Vermont.
Several of them went on to other prizes. Jerry Craft’s New Kid became the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Medal, and Crown was a Newbery Honor and a Caldecott Honor book in the same year.
An American book prize given each year since 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, in three categories: fiction, non-fiction and young readers’ literature. Each winner receives $50,000.
Lucas Schaefer for The Slip (fiction), Scott Anderson for King of Kings (non-fiction) and Thao Lam for Everybelly (young readers’ literature). They were announced on 8 October 2025 in New York.
On 7 October 2026, at a ceremony in New York. The six finalists in each category were announced at the end of August.
Tayari Jones for Kin, Daniyal Mueenuddin for This Is Where the Serpent Lives, Brenda Navarro for Eating Ashes, Julie Orringer for Luna, Phoenix, Queen, Douglas Stuart for John of John and Colson Whitehead for Cool Machine.
By getting a Kirkus Star, the starred review that Kirkus Reviews gives to the books it rates most highly. There are no submissions; every starred book in the publication window is eligible, self-published books included.
One author: Derrick Barnes, for the picture books Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut in 2018 and I Am Every Good Thing in 2020, both illustrated by Gordon C. James.
$50,000 to each of the three winners. Kirkus calls it one of the richest literary awards in the world.
Every winner has a full entry on this page. For the other big American prizes, my page on the Pulitzer Prize winners covers every winner since 1980.
Winner list last verified 22 September 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.
“This joyful celebration of humanity springs to life through masterful, vibrant collages and text that’s both poignant and witty.”
— The 2025 Kirkus Prize judges, on Everybelly
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