8 Award-Winning Nonfiction Books You’ve Never Heard Of

Trinidadian writer Andre Bagoo has written poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. In this collection of essays, he explores art, literature, pop culture, Caribbean history, politics, queerness, and his own life. It’s a blend of moving personal stories, incisive literary criticism, and social commentary. Anyone interested in Caribbean literature should definitely check out this book, the rest of his work, and the rest of the OCM Bocas prize winners!

The Jhalak Award is given yearly to a book by a writer of color living in Britain. In this sprawling, documentary-style work of nonfiction, Johny Pitts critically examines Black Europe. He writes about the intersections of race and geography that lie at the center of Black European identity, taking readers on a tour of the places, institutions, moments, and movements that have influenced and shaped the culture, lives, art, and politics of Afropeans.

This comprehensive, genre-blending work is a kind of community biography of one of Australia’s most well-known Aboriginal leaders, Tracker Tilmouth. Tilmouth spent most of his life as an activist and politician working for Aboriginal rights. Wright’s book is structured as a posthumous memoir, combining Tilmouth’s own writing and interviews with the recollections of his family, friends, and colleagues.

This was easily the best book I read in 2022 and one I will be recommending to everyone forever. Lou Sullivan was a trans writer and activist who was involved in early advocacy and community organizing around trans issues, especially for trans men. His diaries are funny and horny and silly, smart and reflective, contradictory and joyful, full of pain and anger and delight. His words are an absolute gift, one to be cherished.

If you love nonfiction books that use fascinating stories as a lens to explore human nature and a way to ponder big questions, this is the book for you. Schalansky frames the book around 12 objects that have been lost or that no longer exist — things as different as a species of tiger and a famous painting. Woven through these stories of lost things are beautiful, insightful reflections on the nature of loss and memory.

Technically, the Whiting Award is given to an emerging writer, and not a particular book, but Nadia Owusu’s extraordinary debut is well worth reading. Using the metaphor of earthquakes to explore how events have reverberated throughout her life, she writes about her childhood on multiple continents, the death of her father, her tumultuous relationship with her stepmother, multiracial identity, mental health, and so much more.

This beautiful book is part history and part memoir. Tanaïs is a perfumer, and so they use scent as a jumping off point to delve into their personal and family history, the history of South Asia as a region, and the ways that imperialism and colonialism have shaped, and continue to shape, how we talk and write and think about the world. Their writing is sensory and vivid, and even though they tackle many thorny ideas, they always return to small moments of intimacy and heartbreak, reflecting on how those ideas map onto real lives.

In this blend of poetry, essay, and memoir, Ghríofa untangles the connections between her own life and experience of contemporary motherhood and the life of an 18th-century Irish poet whose work has been mostly lost to history. In examining the life of a writer who lived centuries before her, and by reading and rereading the fragments of her work that have survived, Ghríofa explores art, motherhood, memory, and what it means to be a woman and an artist.