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August 27, 2025By Katy Hershberger

Kirkus Prize Finalists

August 27, 2025By Katy Hershberger

Kirkus announced finalists for the $50,000 Kirkus Prize. The winners will be announced on October 8.

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

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

Young Readers’ Literature
Picture Books
Brian Floca, Island Storm, illustrated by Sydney Smith (Holiday House/Neal Porter)
Thao Lam, Everybelly (Groundwood)

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

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

Filed Under: Awards

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