• Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - King: A Life by Jonathan Eig
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert
  • Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies - The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne & Tamara Payne

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographies

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is awarded annually to “a distinguished and appropriately documented” biography by an author from or based in the United States. The authors of winning books receive $15,000, and join a starry pantheon of great American writers. Here, we’ve put together a summary of all the Pulitzer-winning biographies since the turn of the millennium.

  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Peacemakers: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis
  • The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners - One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown

The Best Nonfiction of the Past Quarter Century: The Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners, recommended by Sophie Roell

“All the best stories are true” runs the tagline of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the UK’s pre-eminent nonfiction book award. This year, to celebrate the prize’s 25th birthday, a panel of judges picked out books for a winner of winners award, making for an excellent collection of nonfiction books from the last quarter of a century, as Five Books editor Sophie Roell explains.

  • New History Books - A Cool Head in Hell: The Wartime Diaries of a British Doctor from Dunkirk to the Burma Railway by Harry Silman & Jacqueline Passman (editor)
  • New History Books - King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
  • New History Books - The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom by David Woodman
  • New History Books - The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century by Tim Weiner
  • New History Books - The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World by Selena Wisnom
  • New History Books - The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb by Garrett Graff

New History Books

It’s a golden age for historical writing, as well-researched and sometimes quite specialist books by historians are written in an engaging style for a broad audience. History books out in recent months range from ancient Assyria to the CIA in the 21st century.

  • The best books on The Soviet Union - The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - Khrushchev Remembers by Nikita Khrushchev
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - The Trial Begins by Andrei Sinyavsky (published under the name Abram Tertz)
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva
  • The best books on The Soviet Union - A Precocious Autobiography by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

The best books on The Soviet Union, recommended by Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Soviet Union was the world’s first communist country and lasted around seven decades. It played a key role in defeating Nazism in Europe and became a global superpower before collapsing unexpectedly in 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick, a leading historian of the Soviet Union, recommends books that bring to life different aspects of it, from forced labour in Glavnoye Upravleniye LAGerey (GULAG) to the heady days of the Khrushchev thaw and including the memoir of Stalin’s beloved daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.

  • The best books on Black Holes - Black Holes: The Key to Understanding the Universe by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw
  • The best books on Black Holes - Light in the Darkness: Black Holes, the Universe, and Us by Heino Falcke
  • The best books on Black Holes - The Event Horizon as a Vanishing Point: a History of the First Image of a Black Hole Shadow from Observation by Emilie Skulberg
  • The best books on Black Holes - Inuyasha by Rumiko Takahashi
  • The best books on Black Holes - Black Holes and Uncle Albert by Russell Stannard

The best books on Black Holes, recommended by Lynn Gamwell

In the past five years, over 30 books have been published on black holes for a popular audience—testimony to our enduring fascination with these areas of spacetime from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Lynn Gamwell, author of Conjuring the Void—a beautiful book that looks at both scientific and artistic images of black holes—talks us through five of her favourites, including a PhD thesis that has not yet been published as a book.