NEWS

6 PRH Titles Shortlisted for the 2025 Lukas Prizes Announced by the Columbia Journalism School 

On February 19, 2025, Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced the 2025 shortlists for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. 

The Lukas Prizes, established in 1998, recognize excellence in nonfiction that exemplifies the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the work of the awards’ Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake, J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997.  

Four awards are given: two J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize. This year, six Penguin Random House titles have been shortlisted across the three categories, making up over one-third of the total list!

Discover our short-listers below.

Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Awards

The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards are given annually to aid in the completion of significant works of nonfiction on American topics of political or social concern. Two winners will receive $25,000. 

THE END OF THE WEST by Susie Cagle (Random House) 

Susie Cagle.

Through text, illustration, archival research and field reporting, including interviews with more than 300 subjects, THE END OF THE WEST tells the story of California at the vanguard of colonialism, capitalism and now climate change, through the stories of people and places intent on profound adaptation.   

RUTTER: The Story of an American Underclass by Dan Xin Huang (Knopf) 

Dan Xin Huang

In RUTTER: The Story of an American Underclass, a deeply reported, polyphonic narrative, journalist Dan Xin Huang returns to his Appalachian hometown of Athens, Ohio, a community beset by segregation, to offer an exploration of class in America. He gives voice to people on all sides — across generations, political affinities and socioeconomic strata — of a heated, historic school integration debate. From the same publisher as J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, Rutter depicts the realities of those living at the deep end of our increasingly unequal, rigged system.   

The winners and finalists of the 2025 Lukas Prizes will be announced on Tuesday, March 18. The awards will be presented at a ceremony at Columbia University on Tuesday, May 6.

Anthony Lukas Book Prize

The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize recognizes superb examples of nonfiction writing that exemplify the literary grace, commitment to serious research, and original reporting that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s namesake, J. Anthony Lukas. Books must be on a topic of American political or social concern. 

HOMELAND: The War on Terror in American Life by Richard Beck (Crown) 

For 20 years after 9/11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In HOMELAND, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how the war fundamentally changed American life and explains why there is no going back. He isolates and investigates four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that connects the endurance of the war on terror to the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture.” To see American life through the lens of HOMELAND’s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In his startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political and cultural fabric.   

BRINGING BEN HOME: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice by Barbara Bradley Hagerty (Penguin Random House) 

In 1987, Ben Spencer, a 22-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young — a crime he didn’t commit. From the day of his arrest, Spencer insisted that it was “an awful mistake.” The Texas legal system didn’t see it that way. It allowed shoddy police work, paid witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct to convict Spencer of murder and ignored later efforts to correct this error. Award-winning journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty spent years digging into America’s broken legal system and immersing herself in Spencer’s case. She combed police files and court records, interviewed dozens of witnesses, and had extensive conversations with Spencer. In BRINGING BEN HOME: A Murder, a Conviction and the Fight to Redeem American Justice, she threads together two narratives: how an innocent Black man got caught up in and couldn’t escape a legal system that refused to admit its mistakes; and what Texas and other states are doing to address wrongful convictions to make the legal process more equitable for everyone.   

THE UNCLAIMED: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans (Crown) 

THE UNCLAIMED: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels is an intimate, deeply moving investigation of an underreported phenomenon — the rising number of unclaimed dead in America today. Each year, up to 150,000 Americans go unclaimed by their relatives after death, leaving local governments to dispose of their bodies. In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the poignant, twisting paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will. THE UNCLAIMED forces us to confront social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness that reaffirm our shared humanity. Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, THE UNCLAIMED urges us to expand our circle of caring — in death and in life.   

Mark Lynton History Prize 

The Mark Lynton History Prize is awarded to the book-length work of narrative history, on any subject, that best combines intellectual distinction with felicity of expression. 

NATIVE NATIONS: A Millenium in North America by Kathleen DuVal (Random House) 

NATIVE NATIONS: A Millenium in North America is “an essential American history” (The Wall Street Journal) that places the power of Native nations at its center. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy and complex economies spread across North America. As historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans arrived, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well-armed. For centuries afterward, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests.  Even as control of the continent shifted toward the United States through the 19th century, Native Nations shows how the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant — and will continue far into the future.   

The winners and finalists of the 2025 Lukas Prizes will be announced on Tuesday, March 18, so stay tuned! Wishing our publishers the best of luck.