Reading List · Narrative nonfiction
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is the flagship award of the Lukas Prize Project, established in 1998 and co-administered by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. It honours nonfiction on an American topic that shows literary grace, serious research and social concern. The prize is named after J. Anthony Lukas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who died in 1997. The first prize was awarded in 1999; the winner receives US$10,000.
By Lisanne Swart · 28 winners since 1999 · Narrative nonfiction · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
Click a title to read about it further down ↓
The 2026 prize, for books published in 2025, went to Jeff Hobbs for Seeking Shelter, announced on 17 March 2026, with a ceremony at Columbia University in May 2026. Submissions are accepted each autumn for the following year’s awards.
Quick answer
The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize is an annual US$10,000 award for American nonfiction combining literary grace, serious research and social concern, run by Columbia Journalism School and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. It has been awarded since 1999. The 2026 winner is Seeking Shelter by Jeff Hobbs.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every winner for Lukas Book Prize, all 28 of them. The latest fifteen 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.
The shop links on this page go straight to the shop. They are not affiliate links and I earn nothing if you buy.
Traces three American families who crossed the colour line from black to white: the Gibsons of the South Carolina backcountry in the 1760s, the Spencers of eastern Kentucky in the mid-1800s and the Walls of post-Civil War Washington, DC.
Sharfstein was a law professor at Vanderbilt University when the book was published by Penguin Press.
A study of how families adapt to children with physical, mental and social differences or disabilities. In the UK it was published a few months later under the title A Dozen Kinds of Love.
Also won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize.
An account of Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when flooding and power failure trapped patients and staff for five days, and of the allegations that some patients were euthanised before evacuation.
Adapted as an Apple TV+ limited series written and run by John Ridley and Carlton Cuse.
An investigation of bacha posh, the Afghan practice of raising a girl as a boy, following children such as Mehran, the fourth daughter of parliamentarian Azita, through childhood, puberty and later life.
Nordberg contributed to a New York Times series that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
A narrative of the 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki and its aftermath, told through five survivors who were teenagers at the time, followed by Southard across more than half a century.
An earlier version of the project was a finalist for the Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in 2012.
Younge chose a single day, 23 November 2013, and tells the stories of the ten children and teenagers, aged between nine and nineteen, who were shot dead in the United States that day.
Younge was an editor at large at The Guardian.
Follows several working-class residents of Janesville, Wisconsin, over the five years from 2008 to 2013, tracing their lives after the closure of the town’s Janesville Assembly Plant.
Won the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Drawing on Bauer’s time in 2014 working undercover as a guard at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, then run by Corrections Corporation of America, the book alternates with a history of incarceration for profit in the US.
Also won the 2019 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
A sequence of portraits set in Chicago over the summer of 2013, following high-school students, former gang leaders and others affected by gun violence, arranged in order from the start of the summer to its end.
Kotlowitz is also the author of the earlier book There Are No Children Here.
Follows two refugee families resettled in Austin, Texas, one from Myanmar and one from Syria, and sets their stories within the history of US refugee resettlement from the Second World War to recent restrictions.
Goudeau worked with refugees in Austin for more than a decade and co-founded the nonprofit Hill Tribers.
Tells the story of Dasani, a girl growing up homeless in New York City, expanded from a five-part New York Times series first published in December 2013.
Won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Examines how racism in American medicine and society leaves Black Americans living shorter, less healthy lives, from medical tools and texts carrying slavery-era assumptions to environmental racism and the toll of everyday discrimination.
Villarosa is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a former executive editor of Essence.
The true story of a racist social media account created by a high-school student in Albany, California, whose posts spread among classmates and reached nearly everyone in town once discovered.
Slater’s earlier book The 57 Bus won the Stonewall Book Award.
Traces the fight over tribal land in eastern Oklahoma, linking the forced removal of Native nations with a 1990s small-town murder case that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native land rights.
Nagle, a Cherokee Nation citizen, earlier covered the case in the podcast This Land.
Follows Evelyn, a waitress who became homeless with her children in Los Angeles in 2018 despite full-time work, told from her perspective, that of her social worker Wendi and that of her teenage son Orlando.
Hobbs’s earlier book, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, won the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest.
The Lukas Prize Project presents four awards in three categories each year. Alongside the Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize (US$10,000) goes to a book-length narrative history on any subject; recent winners include Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America (2024), Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations (2025) and William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road (2026).
Two J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards of US$25,000 each support the completion of an unpublished nonfiction book on an American political or social topic. The 2026 awards went to danah boyd for Data Are Made, Not Found and Karim Zidan for In the Shadow of the Cage. Susan Southard’s Nagasaki was a Work-in-Progress finalist in 2012 before winning the Book Prize in 2016.
J. Anthony Lukas was a former New York Times correspondent and Nieman Fellow who won two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; his books include Common Ground and Big Trouble. Mark Lynton, born in Stuttgart in 1920, served in the British military, worked for Citroën and Hunter Douglas, and died in 1997; his family has underwritten the project since 1998.
Each award has its own panel of judges. For 2026 the Book Prize panel was chaired by Héctor Tobar, and the three panels chose the winners from 473 entries. Year labels refer to the award year: the 2026 prize covered books published in 2025.
An annual US$10,000 award for nonfiction on an American topic that combines literary grace, serious research and social concern, given by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation.
Jeff Hobbs, for Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America.
The Lukas Prize Project was established in 1998, and the first Book Prize went to Henry Mayer’s All on Fire in 1999.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, formerly of The New York Times, whose books include Common Ground; he died in 1997.
A US$10,000 companion award for narrative history on any subject, named after the executive and author Mark Lynton, whose family sponsors the project.
Two grants of US$25,000 each to help authors complete a significant nonfiction book on an American political or social topic.
Shortlists are published in February and winners in March, with a ceremony at Columbia University in May.
Book-length nonfiction on American political or social concerns published in the previous calendar year.
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.
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsThe Night Owl Book Finder
