The 2025 Kirkus Prize

The winners of the 2025 Kirkus Prize in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction and Young Readers’ Literature were announced on October 8th in an in-person ceremony at the Tribeca Rooftop in New York that also was livestreamed on Kirkus's YouTube channel.

Tom Beer, the editor-in-chief of Kirkus, said, “This year’s Kirkus Prize winners bring us vital messages for our time --- messages about the joys of community, the power of self-transformation, and the mutability of historical events --- all conveyed through exhilarating prose and pictures.”

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Macavity Awards 2025

The winners of this year’s Macavity Awards have been announced. The Macavity Award is named for the “mystery cat” of T.S. Eliot (OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS). Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favorite mysteries in five categories.

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Jane Hamilton, author of The Phoebe Variations

Seventeen-year-old Phoebe was never interested in her birth family. But on the cusp of her high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe. With the help of her best friend, Luna, Phoebe runs away --- as far as their friend Patrick O’Connor’s chaotic home, where she hopes to go unnoticed among his 13 siblings. But when Phoebe asks Patrick to chop off her hip-length hair, she’s suddenly transformed. Patrick’s older brothers can’t help but notice the striking, Peter Pan–like stranger who suddenly has appeared in their midst. What starts as an adolescent rebellion soon spirals into a whirlwind of self-discovery and unexpected connections.

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Walter Mosley, author of Gray Dawn: An Easy Rawlins Mystery

The name Easy Rawlins stirs excitement in the hearts of readers and fear in the hearts of his foes. His success has bought him a thriving detective agency, with its first female detective; a remote home, shared with children and pets and lovers, high atop the hills overlooking gritty Los Angeles; and more trouble, more problems and more threats to those whom he loves. In other words, he’s still beset on all sides. A number of below-the-law powerbrokers plead with Easy to locate a mysterious, dangerous woman --- Lutisha James, though she’s gone by another name that Easy will immediately recognize. 1970s Los Angeles is a transient city of delicate, violent balances, and Lutisha has disturbed that. She also has a secret that will upend Easy’s own life, painfully closer to home.

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