Award-Winning Memoirs of 2025

Memoir is a wide-ranging genre, spanning celebrity tell-alls to experimental work blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, memory and opinion. This year, autobiographical books won major general nonfiction prizes—the Baillie Gifford Prize in the UK and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in the US—as well as the annual, genre-specific prizes aimed at celebrating memoir as a form. We’ve drawn together a list of the most notable prize-winning titles.

The Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography

Tessa Hulls’ extraordinary graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts offers personal insight into the long shadow cast by political persecution: upon her grandmother Sun Yi, a dissident journalist in Shanghai during the Communist regime; her high-achieving mother Rose, who struggles to care for Sun Yi following a mental breakdown; and onto Tessa herself, who fled to the ends of the earth to escape her family’s problems—but is now ready to face her inheritance. The Pulitzer Prize committee praised Feeding Ghosts as “an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women …. and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”

The Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction

This year, the surprise winner of Britain’s biggest nonfiction prize was Helen Garner’s How to End a Story—a collection of her diaries kept between 1978 and 1998. “I have to confess that, at first, I was a bit sceptical about this book,” admitted Robbie Millen, the critic and chair of this year’s judging panel, during an interview with Five Books editor Sophie Roell earlier this year. “It’s 800 pages… That’s a lot of words about someone who I didn’t know huge amounts about. But I found it absolutely gripping.” She is an excellent and observer of everyday life, he commented, but the real “pull-through” is her unsparing account of her two marriages, one of which begins as an affair and ends in violence. He added: “I love how novelists in particular—the really good ones—just go to places where mere mortals like me would never go, whether it’s baring their emotions or revealing their inner lives.”

The National Book Award for Nonfiction

The nonfiction National Book Award also went to a work of memoir this year: Omar El Akkad’s powerful, personal, and highly political essay collection, which reflects on his experiences as an Arab immigrant, and criticises the West’s indifference to Palestinian suffering. Collecting the award, El Akkad said in his speech: “It’s difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have spent two years seeing what shrapnel does to a child’s body. It is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I know that my tax money is doing this. And it is difficult to think in celebratory terms when I have been watching people snatched off the streets by masked agents of the state for daring to suggest that Palestinians might be human beings.” The book expands on a viral social media post, in which he observed: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

The National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir & Autobiography

Patriot, the posthumously-published memoir by Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny—banned in his home country and denounced as “extremist materials”—has been extremely well received in the west. Here in the UK, it was announced the ‘book of the year’ at the British Book Awards, and in the US the National Book Critics Circle awarded it their top prize for autobiography. When I spoke to May-lee Chai, one of the NBCC judges, about the shortlist, she described it as “the whole package: it tells a compelling story of a man whose life was important and impactful and it’s a very literary book.” Not only that, she added, but “the writing is beautiful! It’s not just a journalistic account of Navalny’s struggles under Putin’s authoritarianism, but it also showcases Navalny’s talent as a writer.” Despite the seriousness of his subject matter, “Navalny writes with surprising humour… He has a sharp eye for irony and characterization, and even when he is imprisoned, he can write about his captors and his experiences with great wit.”

The TLS Ackerley Prize

This autobiography-focused prize can be relied upon to highlight some of the most interesting new memoirs being published in the UK. This year, the winner was Jeff Young’s Wild Twin—also shortlisted for the 2025 Stanfords Travel Book of the Year prize—which offers an account of the author’s years as a drifter, intertwined with reflections from the present day. It is at once, noted judge Peter Parker, “a ruefully funny account of a young Liverpudlian’s dreams of pursuing the life of a poète maudit in Europe and a moving meditation on how lives are built upon our memories and unravel without them. Jeff Young’s description of his time in Amsterdam in the early 1980s brilliantly evokes the hand-to-mouth existence of life on the margins, living in squats, pilfering goods, cleaning hotels and working in seedy bars. Almost half a century later he is back in Liverpool, where both his mother and one of his sisters have died and his father is drifting into the fog of Alzheimer’s.” Wild Twin, they concluded, “is a wonderfully original and beautifully written autobiography.”