RBmedia is the audio home for four of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists! We publish the audio editions for this year’s winners for General Nonfiction and History, as well two finalists in the Memoir/Autobiography and Poetry categories. We will also soon release the French-language audio for the General Fiction winner James by Percival Everett. View the full list of 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists here. 

Winners

General Nonfiction Winner

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement

Written by Benjamin Nathans
Performed by Rich Miller
Published by Recorded Books

A gripping history of the Soviet dissident movement, which hastened the end of the USSR—and still provides a model of opposition in Putin’s Russia. An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

 

 

 

History Winner

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War

Written by Edda L. Fields-Black
Performed by Machelle Williams
Published by Highbridge

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman’s most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants. Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina’s Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people.

 

 

 

Finalists

Memoir/Autobiography Finalist

Fi: A Memoir

Written by Alexandra Fuller
Performed by Alexandra Fuller
Published by Recorded Books

From the award-winning New York Times bestselling author, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child. By turns disarming, devastating andunexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

 

 

 

 

Poetry Finalist

BLUFF: Poems

Written by Danez Smith
Performed by Danez Smith
Published by Highbridge

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.