The Award Archive
Our most competitive year to that point — five winners, ten shortlist selections and a longlist of the year's best non-fiction books, chosen from more than 1,000 titles and announced live in December 2022.
The year's biggest themes: fighting to save books and bookstores, celebrating underappreciated women, reclaiming the web, learning from animals — and figuring out how to emerge from the pandemic comfortable with ourselves.
The 2022 Winners
Hayley Campbell spends time with the people who work with death: embalmers, executioners, gravediggers. What their work teaches the rest of us about living is unforgettable.
Yale psychologist Woo-kyoung Ahn turns her famous “Thinking” course into a guide to the reasoning errors we all make, and the research-backed ways to fix them.
James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti turn overlooked data into breathtaking maps and graphics that make the invisible patterns of our world impossible to unsee.
Poker champion Annie Duke dismantles our worship of grit and teaches the most undervalued skill in business and life: knowing when to walk away.
Johann Hari investigates why the world stopped paying attention, and shows that our attention crisis is not a personal failing but something being done to us.
Watch The Announcement
The Biggest Book Trends of 2022
As part of our judging process, we curate the biggest themes from all the non-fiction books we evaluate throughout the year. Here are the seven biggest themes we identified from books published during 2022.
As bookstores come under threat, authors explore the evolution of language and passionately defend books and those who sell them.
Unsung women in aviation, fitness, entertainment & more are profiled and celebrated along with books that help women to speak up and lead.
The battle for the soul of the Internet is alive and these books define what's at stake and expose the manipulators so we can reclaim the web together.
Animals can teach us about ourselves. These titles explore the way animals communicate and think, how we can talk back and why it matters.
As pandemic lockdowns end, the world reckons with what has changed in these books that illuminate the shift and explore how to be happy now.
Dictators, authoritarians and other bad actors are seemingly winning and these books explore what makes evil triumph and how to fight back.
What does it take to live your best life and be comfortable with yourself? These post-pandemic titles explore how to be ok and maybe even happy.
The Shortlist
The finalists — narrowed from the longlist and revealed during the live announcement show.
Kyle Scheele invited strangers to write down the ideas they needed to let die, and got 20,000 confessions. A joyful, surprisingly moving book about burning your old self-stories.
Retail anthropologist Paco Underhill turns his famous observational eye on food: how we shop for it, cook it and eat it, and where it’s all heading next.
Journalist Mónica Guzmán, a liberal daughter of Trump-voting parents, delivers the best practical guide yet to genuinely curious conversations across divides.
Brookings scholar Richard Reeves takes on one of the most uncomfortable questions in modern life, why boys and men are falling behind, with data, empathy and courage.
New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv’s extraordinary reported meditation on the stories we tell about mental illness, and what happens when the diagnosis becomes the identity.
David Sax argues the pandemic proved the all-digital future is a place nobody actually wants to live. The case for a real-world life has never been made better.
Weapons of Math Destruction author Cathy O’Neil exposes the growing industry that profits from our shame, from diet companies to social media pile-ons.
Therapist Whitney Goodman pushes back on “good vibes only” culture and shows how real support beats forced positivity every time.
Six former PepsiCo executives, the Band of Sisters, catalog the everyday, deniable slights that hold women back at work and give everyone scripts for shutting them down.
Game designer Adrian Hon reveals how gamification’s points, badges and streaks became tools for controlling workers, consumers and citizens, and how to resist.
The Longlist
Every longlist selection from 2022, listed alphabetically. Each of these books was read and selected by our review team from 1,000+ entries.
Your Turn
Entries for the 2026 Non-Obvious Book Awards are now open — and it costs nothing to enter.
How To Enter →
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