8 Award-Winning Nonfiction Books You Might Not Have Heard Of

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo (OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2021)

Trinidadian writer Andre Bagoo has written poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In this postulation of essays, helium explores art, literature, popular culture, Caribbean history, politics, queerness, and his ain life. It’s a blend of moving idiosyncratic stories and incisive literate disapproval and societal commentary. Anyone funny successful Caribbean lit should decidedly cheque retired this book, the remainder of his work, and the remainder of OCM Bocas prize winners!

Afropean by Johny Pitts (Jhalak Prize 2020)

The Jhalak Award is fixed yearly to a publication by a writer of colour surviving successful Britain. In this sprawling, documentary-style enactment of nonfiction, Johny Pitts critically examines Black Europe. He writes astir the intersections of contention and geography that prevarication astatine the halfway of Black European identity, taking readers connected a circuit of the places, institutions, moments, and movements that person influenced and shaped the culture, lives, art, and authorities of Afropeans.

Thank you for signing up! Keep an oculus connected your inbox.

By signing up you hold to our terms of use

Tracker by Alexis Wright (Stella Prize 2018)

This comprehensive, genre-blending enactment is simply a benignant of assemblage biography of 1 of Australia’s astir well-known Aboriginal leaders, Tracker Tilmouth. Tilmouth spent astir of his beingness arsenic an activistic and person moving for Aboriginal rights. Wright’s publication is structured arsenic a posthumous memoir, combining Tilmouth’s ain penning and interviews with the recollections of his family, friends, and colleagues.

We Both Laughed successful Pleasure by Lou Sullivan (Lambda Award 2019)

This was easy the champion publication I work successful 2022, and 1 I volition beryllium recommending to everyone, forever. Lou Sullivan was a trans writer and activistic who was progressive successful aboriginal advocacy and assemblage organizing astir trans issues, particularly for trans men. His diaries are comic and horny and silly, astute and reflective, contradictory and joyful, afloat of symptom and choler and delight. His words are an implicit gift, 1 to beryllium cherished.

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky, Translated by Jackie Smith (Warwick Prize for Women successful Translation 2019)

If you emotion nonfiction books that usage fascinating stories arsenic a lens to research quality quality and a mode to ponder large questions, this is the publication for you. Schalansky frames the publication astir 12 objects that person been lost, oregon that nary longer beryllium — things arsenic antithetic arsenic a taxon of tiger and a celebrated painting. Woven done these stories of mislaid things are beautiful, insightful reflections connected the quality of nonaccomplishment and memory.

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (Whiting Award 2019)

Technically the Whiting Award is fixed to an emerging writer, and not a peculiar book, but Nadia Owusu’s bonzer debut is good worthy reading. Using the metaphor of earthquakes to research however events person reverberated passim her life, she writes astir her puerility connected aggregate continents, the decease of her father, her tumultuous narration with her stepmother, multiracial identity, intelligence health, and truthful overmuch more.

In Sensorium by Tanaïs (Kirkus Prize 2022)

This beauteous publication is portion past and portion memoir. Tanaïs is simply a perfumer, and truthful they usage scent arsenic jumping disconnected constituent to delve into their idiosyncratic and household history, the past of South Asia arsenic a region, and the ways that imperialism and colonialism person shaped, and proceed to shape, however we speech and constitute and deliberation astir the world. Their penning is sensory and vivid, and adjacent though they tackle galore thorny ideas, they ever instrumentality to tiny moments of intimacy and heartbreak, reflecting connected however those ideas representation onto existent lives.

A Ghost successful the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2020)

In this blend of poetry, essay, and memoir, Ghríofa untangles the connections betwixt her ain beingness and acquisition of modern motherhood and the beingness of an 18th period Irish writer whose enactment has been mostly mislaid to history. In examining the beingness of a writer who lived centuries earlier her, and by speechmaking and rereading the fragments of her enactment that person survived, Ghríofa explores art, motherhood, memory, and what it means to beryllium a pistillate and an artist.