The Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. The award honors "a distinguished and factual memoir or autobiography by an American author." Winners receive US$15,000.
Recipients +Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography winners and finalistsYearAuthorTitlePublisherRationale2023Stay TrueDoubleday"An elegant and poignant coming of age account that considers intense, youthful friendships but also random violence that can suddenly and permanently alter the presumed logic of our personal narratives."Easy Beauty: A MemoirAvid Reader Press"A spellbinding and brutally honest memoir drawing on art, travel, cultural observation and philosophical scholarship to convey the full experience of life as a disabled person whose view of humanity becomes increasingly compassionate."Simon and SchusterThe Man Who Could Move Clouds: A MemoirDoubleday"A lyrical personal account that reclaims a family legacy of indigenous practices, beliefs, and narratives to challenge Western notions of history and memory."2024Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for JusticeHogarth"A genre-bending account of the author's 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss."The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of SightPenguin Press"An emotionally resonant account by an author losing his eyesight from a rare genetic disorder, a memoir that explores the physical and conceptual experience of blindness, and that explains honestly how ableism fueled his reticence to accept his diagnosis."The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good IntentionsPenguin Press"An account of the author's brilliant childhood best friend and fellow student who was diagnosed as schizophrenic before fatally stabbing his girlfriend, a tragedy used to explore mental illness and the history of institutionalization."2025Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic MemoirMCD"An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women—the author, her mother and grandmother—and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories."Fi: A Memoir of My SonGrove"An elegiac meditation on motherhood and grief, written from the rage and pain of losing a child, but in a voice that ultimately resonates with beauty and hard-won acceptance."I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of TransitionPenguin Press"A questioning yet clear-eyed narrative of the author's journey to become who she is from who she once was, set against a vanished New York City that is profoundly part of her past."2026Things in Nature Merely GrowFarrar, Straus and Giroux"A writer's deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life."I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A MemoirAvid Reader Press"A memoir that reimagines diaspora and the long consequences of war with literary clarity, in which the author's experiences with infertility and then motherhood are juxtaposed with an intergenerational family history."Simon and SchusterClam Down: A MetamorphosisOne World"An experimental and deeply original memoir in which the writer reimagines herself as a clam, using humor and tenderness to explore a fraught relationship with her father and the pressures of being a first-generation daughter of immigrant parents."Bibliophobia: A MemoirRandom House"An incisive account that illustrates how literary devotion can sustain but also endanger the self, since literature contains ideas that are perilous and revolutionary as well as restorative."
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