2025 Kirkus Prize Finalists Announced

Kirkus Reviews has announced the 18 finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Young Readers’ Literature. Winners in the three categories will receive $50,000 each and will be announced at an in-person ceremony at the TriBeca Rooftop in New York on Wednesday, October 8.

The finalists are:

FICTION

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth)
• The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner Books)
• Isola by Allegra Goodman (Dial Press)
• A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar ( Knopf)
• The Slip by Lucas Schaefer (Simon & Schuster)
• Flesh by David Szalay (Scribner)

NONFICTION

• King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday)
• Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead)
• America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin (Penguin Press)
• Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry
• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner)

YOUNG READERS’ LITERATURE

Picture Books

• Island Storm by Brian Floca, illustrated by Sydney Smith (Holiday House/Neal Porter)
• Everybelly by Thao Lam (Groundwood)

Middle Grade 

• The Incredibly Human Henson Blayze by Derrick Barnes (Viking)
• John the Skeleton by Triinu Laan, illustrated by Marja-Liisa Plats, trans. by Adam Cullen (Restless/Yonder)

Young Adult

• Butterfly Heart by Moa Backe Åstot, trans. by Agnes Broomé (Levine Querido)
• Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal and the Lost Dream of Jonestown by Candace Fleming (Anne Schwartz/Random House)