ThePEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction is awarded byPEN 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 economistJohn 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 isone of many PEN awards sponsored byInternational PEN affiliates in over145 PEN centres around the world. The PEN American Center awards have been characterized as being among the "major" American literary prizes.[2]
| 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 andHank 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 andSteve 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] | |
| 2024 | Saket Soni | The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America | Algonquin Books | Won | [25] |
| Roxanna Asgarian | We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Finalist | [26] | |
| Siddarth Kara | Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives | St. Martin's Press | Finalist | [26] | |
| Tobias Rose-Stockwell | Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—And What We Can Do About It | Legacy Lit | Finalist | [26] | |
| John Vaillant | Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World | Alfred A. Knopf | Finalist | [26] | |
| 2025 | Ana Raquel Minian | In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States | Won | [27] | |
| 2026 | Peter Beinart | Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning | Finalist | [28] | |
| Jeanne Carstensen | A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis | Finalist | [28] | ||
| Siddharth Kara | The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery | Finalist | [28] | ||
| Joseph Lee | Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity | Finalist | [28] | ||
| Julian Brave NoiseCat | We Survived the Night | Finalist | [28] |