The shortlists for the 2025 J. Anthony Lukas Prizes have been revealed, with authors including Rebecca Nagle and Kathleen DuVal in the running for the awards that honor “the best in American nonfiction book writing.”
Nagle was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, given to a book that covers “a topic of American political or social concern,” for By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land; the book is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Also named finalists were Richard Beck for Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life; Barbara Bradley Hagerty for Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice; Mara Kardas-Nelson for We Are Not Able To Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance; and Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans for The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels.
DuVal made the shortlist for the Mark Lynton History Prize for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, alongside Justene Hill Edwards for Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank; Edda L. Fields-Black for COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War; Seth Rockman for Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery; and Michael Waters for The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.
The Lukas Awards, named for the journalist and author of Common Ground and Big Trouble, were established in 1998 and are administered by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Previous winners include Lawrence Wright for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Andrea Elliott for Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City; and Ned Blackhawk for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.
The winners of this year’s awards will be announced on March 18.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
