Illuminating the past and the present: The 2026 Pulitzer Prize winners announced

The winners of the 2026 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, recognising publications, publication staff, individual journalists, and authors across 23 award categories for journalism, reporting, criticism, photography, authorship, and overall excellence in their fields. The winners for each category were announced on May 4,2026 via live broadcasts on the Pulitzer Prizes website and YouTube channel.

The Books, Drama and Music section features prizes awarded for books, namely in the Fiction, History, Biography, Memoir or Autobiography, Poetry, and General Nonfiction categories. This year’s winning works span themes and settings from magical realism rooted in real historical events to deeply vulnerable memoirs of immense personal loss, to striking vignettes of life on the neglected margins of society, and more. A notable common thread across the winning works in these categories this year is the exploration of historical events and precedents and the ways that they continue to affect the present and, likely, the future.

The award in Fiction went to Angel Down (Atria Books, 2025) by Daniel Kraus, described by the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Board as “a stylistic tour de force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole”.

The winner in the History category was We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution (Liveright, 2025) by Jill Lepore, a text that explores the history of failed US constitutional amendments proposed by marginalised groups and what makes said Constitution so difficult to amend.

The Prize for Biography went to Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) by Amanda Vaill, a detailed look into the lives of the noted Schuyler sisters and the roles they played in the American Revolution.

The award in the Memoir or Autobiography category went to Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) by Yiyun Li, a powerful, vulnerable, and profoundly personal memoir of a mother who lost two teenage sons to suicide; “an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life”.

The winner for Poetry was Ars Poeticas (Wesleyan University Press, 2025) by Juliana Spahr, a collection that explores the past and ruminates on the future of poetry and politics, described by the publisher as “lyric meditations on writing poetry in a time of ecological crisis and right wing populism”.

Last but certainly not least, the General Nonfiction winner was There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown, 2025) by Brian Goldstone, a monumental journalistic work detailing the stories of five families from Atlanta, Georgia that sheds light on the growing crisis of “working homelessness” across the United States.

Alongside the prestige and global recognition of being a Pulitzer Prize recipient, each winner will also receive USD 15,000 and certificates for their respective categories.

The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Board was co-chaired by The Boston Globe Editor-at-Large Nancy Barnes and NEWSWELL Executive Director and Arizona State University professor Nicole Carroll, and featured seventeen distinguished journalists, editors, academics, and authors, including Marjorie Miller, Pulitzer Prizes Administrator at Columbia University.