PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction is awarded by PEN America (formerly PEN American Center) biennially "to a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective and illuminating important contemporary issues which have been published in the United States during the previous two calendar years. It is intended that the winning book possess the qualities of intellectual rigor, perspicuity of expression, and stylistic elegance conspicuous in the writings of author and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose four dozen books and countless other publications continue to provide an important and incisive commentary on the American social, intellectual and political scene."^[1]

The winner receives $10,000.

The award is one of many PEN awards sponsored by International PEN affiliates in over 145 PEN centres around the world. The PEN American Center awards have been characterized as being among the "major" American literary prizes.^[2]

Honorees

Award winners, runner-ups, and finalists

Year	Author	Title	Publisher	Result	Ref.
2007	James Carroll	House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power	Mariner Books	Won	[3]
	Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff	The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation	Knopf	Runner-up	[3]
	Thomas E. Ricks	Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq	Penguin Press	Runner-up	[3]
2009	Steve Coll	The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century	Penguin Group)	Won	[3]
	Jeffrey Meyers	Samuel Johnson: The Struggle	Basic Books	Runner-up	[3]
	Stanley Plumly	Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography	W.W. Norton & Co.	Runner-up	[3]
2011	Robert Perkinson	Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire	Picador	Won	[3][4][5]
	John W. Dower	Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq	W.W. Norton & Co.	Runner-up	[3]
	Isabel Wilkerson	The Warmth of Other Suns	Random House	Runner-up	[3]
2013	Katherine Boo	Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity	Random House	Won	[3][6][7]
	Donovan Hohn	Moby-Duck	Penguin Books	Runner-up	[3]
	Anne Applebaum	Iron Curtain	Doubleday	Finalist	[8][9]
	Victoria Sweet	God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine	Riverhead Books	Finalist	[8][9]
2015	Sheri Fink	Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital	Crown	Won	[10][11][12]
	Danielle Allen	Our Declaration	Liveright	Finalist	[13]
	Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru	League of Denial	Crown Archetype	Finalist	[13]
	Jonathan M. Katz	The Big Truck That Went By	Palgrave Macmillan	Finalist	[13]
	Naomi Klein	This Changes Everything	Simon & Schuster	Finalist	[13][14]
2017	Matthew Desmond	Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City	Crown	Won	[3][15]
2019	Bernice Yeung	In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers	Crown	Won	[16]
2021	Saidiya Hartman	Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals	W. W. Norton & Company	Won	[17][18]
2022	Tiya Miles	All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake	Random House	Won	[19][20]
	Andrea Elliott	Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City	Random House	Finalist	[21]
	Reuben Jonathan Miller	Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration	Little Brown and Company	Finalist	[21]
	Sarah Schulman	Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993	Farrar, Straus and Giroux	Finalist	[21]
	Clint Smith	How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America	Little Brown and Company	Finalist	[21]
2023	Eve Fairbanks	The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning	Simon & Schuster	Won	[22][23]
	Kelly Lytle Hernández	Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands	W. W. Norton & Company	Finalist	[24]
	Imani Perry	South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation	HarperCollins Publishers	Finalist	[24]
	Martin Sixsmith	The War of Nerves: Inside the Cold War Mind	Pegasus Books	Finalist	[24]
	Javier Zamora	Solito	Hogarth Press	Finalist	[24]