US. National Book Awards: The 2025 Nonfiction Longlist

The 2025 US National Book Award longlist in Nonfiction comprises reportage, criticism, biography, memoir, and science writing.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

The Second of Five Catetory Longlists

Going on with the United States’ National Book Award longlist announcements, today (September 10), we look at the 2025 Nonfiction category’s longlist.

The National Book Awards’ 2025 shortlists—often called finalists in the lexicon of this prize regime—are expected to be released on October 7. Winners are then to be named on November 19 at the 76th iteration of the program’s fundraising event in New York City.

Last year’s winner in the Nonfiction category was Jason De León for his book Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Penguin Random House / Viking).

Publishers submitted a total 652 books for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction, after offering 671 titles in 2024, a slight decline in submission numbers this year.

The authors on the Nonfiction longlist have been amply awarded in the past by various programs including the Pulitzer Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize, The Giller Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Front Page Award for Online Investigative Reporting, the Oregon Book Award, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the Washington State Book Award.

Their work, organizers say, has appeared in A Public Space, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Forbes, The Guardian, Guernica, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, The New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review and more.

The US National Book Awards pay US$10,000 to each of the five category winners, and $1,000 to finalists. In the case of the Translated Literature award, the cash prize is shared by the author and translator. Winners also receive a bronze sculpture, and finalists each receive a medal.

The 2025 National Book Awards Nonfiction Longlist

The jury for the Nonfiction category this year comprises Heather Kathleen Moody Hall, Tiya Miles (chair), Raj Patel, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Eli Saslow.

Author	Title	Publisher / Imprint
Omar El Akkad	One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This	Penguin Random House / Knopf
Caleb Gayle	Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State	Penguin Random House / Riverhead Books
Julia Ioffe	Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy	HarperCollins / Ecco
Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy	For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising	Penguin Random House / Pantheon
Yiyun Li	Things in Nature Merely Grow	Macmillan / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
Lana Lin	The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam	Dorothy Project
Ben Ratliff	Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening	Graywolf Press
Claudia Rowe	Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care	Abrams / Abrams Press
Jordan Thomas	When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World	Penguin Random House / Riverhead Books
Helen Whybrow	The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life	Milkweed Editions

Jurors’ decisions are made independently of the National Book Foundation staff and board of directors, and deliberations are strictly confidential.

More from Publishing Perspectives on the National Book Awards in the United States is here and more on the huge field of international book awards and prizes is here. More from us on nonfiction is here, more on international publishing rights is here, and more on the United States’ market is here.

Wherever our international readers are in the world, they use our free daily email to be sure they don’t miss any news. Sign up now.

About the Author

Porter Anderson

Porter Anderson has been named International Trade Press Journalist of the Year in London Book Fair's International Excellence Awards. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives. He formerly was Associate Editor for The FutureBook at London's The Bookseller. Anderson was for more than a decade a senior producer and anchor with CNN.com, CNN International, and CNN USA. As an arts critic (Fellow, National Critics Institute), he was with The Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Tampa Tribune, now the Tampa Bay Times. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman.