The Award Archive
Our eleventh year of the awards — 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 2025.
The year's biggest themes: choosing morality in the age of AI, the joy of doing less, defying people-pleasing, trusting your intuition, taking real breaks — and defending democracy under siege.
The 2025 Winners
Sam Kean joins the experimental archaeologists who recreate the sounds, smells and tastes of the ancient world. History you can practically eat, built on an idea unlike anything else we read this year.
Ex-Google executive Jenny Wood reclaims nine so-called bad traits, from weird to selfish, as the courage skills that get you what you want at work and in life. The most immediately usable book we read all year.
Future of StoryTelling founder Charles Melcher charts how stories are moving beyond the page and screen into immersive, interactive experiences that are rewriting the storyteller’s craft.
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s explosive insider memoir of life among Facebook’s leadership. The book everyone in tech, and well beyond it, spent the year talking about.
Rutger Bregman challenges the most talented people of our generation to stop wasting their careers and redirect their ambition toward the world’s biggest problems. We believe this one will echo for years.
Watch The Announcement
The Biggest Book Trends of 2025
As part of our judging process, we curate the biggest trends from all the non-fiction books we evaluate throughout the year. Here are the twelve biggest trends we identified from books published during 2025.
As AI affects work and life in deeper ways, several books posed a clear answer to saving humanity: we need more leaders and organizations to prioritize morality in their decision making — and lessons on how to act in more morally positive ways.
What if you had less work, less stuff, less ambition and less hustle? These books suggested that our quest for the things we describe as good may not be the true path to success — and happiness may come from the things we're able to sacrifice.
Now is the time to lean into your creativity and make the art you've always dreamed of. These books encouraged readers to write, draw, paint and use their imagination to make something fulfilling — inspiring every day to be happier and more full of life.
Live more dangerously and embrace risks to create more luck for yourself — appreciating the power of uncertainty, welcoming doubt and thinking like an explorer to achieve unexpected success. The secret is finding more bravery and self-confidence to do it.
Too often we resort to people pleasing, silence our inner rebel and prioritize keeping the peace. Several books described it as fawning — and all of them suggested defiance, by worrying less what others think and putting yourself first.
The financial world is broken and societal trauma is the result. These books explore unchecked greed, poor economic policies and profit extraction at all costs — and some offer prescriptions to fix it, starting with exposing the evildoers.
As a counter to hustle culture, the new wisdom for career success, a healthier lifestyle and better relationships starts with finding time to relax and breathe. Be happy with what you have. Enjoy your time alone. Work four days a week. And sleep more.
In response to the rise of xenophobia across many cultures, these books remind us of the significant wisdom that comes from listening to voices from other cultures and countries — from optimal parenting techniques to finding more joy at work.
Your intuition is your superpower — if you can remember to listen to it. These books argued you can sell more, better understand people, and find your purpose by being more attuned to your inner voice and acting on what you already know in your gut.
The modern workplace is filled with terrible bosses, mistaken incentives and unleadable people. These books show how to fix what's wrong with the systems at work — by rethinking work, not emailing at midnight, and talking nicer.
How can nature make us better? From trees to fishes to birds to snakes, these books compile the many forms of wisdom we might take from the non-human species living all around us — and suggest it might be the key to solving many other problems too.
Responding to a year of unprecedented threats to the foundational ideas of democracy across the globe, these books explored what happened, why we are divided, whether it can be reversed and how to preserve the delicate idea of democracy.
The Shortlist
The finalists — narrowed from the longlist and revealed during the live announcement show.
Linguist and internet etymologist Adam Aleksic shows how algorithms are rewriting language itself, from brainrot slang to why we say “unalive.” The sharpest book yet on how the feed shapes how we speak.
BBC journalist Eliot Stein travels the world to meet the last custodians of vanishing cultural traditions. A moving reminder of what humanity keeps only by paying attention.
Cory Doctorow coined the word for why every platform gets worse. Here he explains the full decay cycle, names the forces behind it, and maps how users and workers can fight back.
Tim Minshall’s eye-opening tour of the invisible manufacturing machine behind everything you own. You will never look at a toothbrush, a jet engine or a shipping container the same way.
Animal cognition researcher Justin Gregg explores our irrepressible habit of seeing human minds everywhere, in pets, gadgets and chatbots, and what that instinct reveals about our own.
Wharton economist Judd Kessler argues that luck can be engineered. Once you understand the hidden markets that allocate life’s opportunities, you can position yourself to win them.
Celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman pulls back the curtain on how he reads people, turning his stage techniques into practical lessons in attention, connection and influence.
The Shallows author Nicholas Carr returns with a sobering argument: our communication technologies help us say ever more while understanding each other ever less.
Carnegie Mellon’s Rosalind Chow makes the case for sponsorship over mentorship. Real career change happens when someone doesn’t just advise you, but opens doors on your behalf.
Journalist Helen Lewis gleefully dismantles the myth of the lone genius, and shows what our worship of brilliant individuals costs teams, institutions and truth.
The Longlist
Every longlist selection from 2025, 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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