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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.”

Angela Flournoy, author of The Wilderness

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique and Nakia are in their early 20s and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood --- overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences --- swoops in and stays. As these friends move from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another --- amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.