Lucas Schaefer's The Slip Wins 2025 Kirkus Prize for Fiction

2025 Kirkus Prize winners

As November’s chill settles in and daylight fades early, it’s the perfect season to curl up with a story that captivates and challenges. For readers seeking this year’s standout literary gems, the newly announced Kirkus Prize winners offer a ready-made reading list led by Lucas Schaefer, who took home the fiction prize for his remarkable debut, The Slip.

Announced in October, the 2025 Kirkus Prizes honored excellence in fiction, nonfiction, and young readers’ literature. Schaefer’s The Slip stood out for its daring narrative and sharp social insight. Set around an Austin, Texas, boxing gym and the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy, the novel, according to jurors, “fearlessly explores issues of race, class, sex, and gender through a wildly inventive group of characters and events.” They added that comparisons to Franzen, Roth, and Irving are “earned and deserved.”

The fiction judges - Thérèse Purcell Nielsen, Oscar Villalon, and Kirkus fiction editor Laurie Muchnick - selected The Slip from more than 380 starred fiction titles published over the past year. Schaefer received a handcrafted Vezzini & Chen trophy and a $50,000 cash prize.

The nonfiction award went to Scott Anderson for King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, a gripping chronicle of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its far-reaching consequences. Thao Lam won in the young readers’ literature category for Everybelly, a joyful picture book celebrating body diversity and community through vibrant collage art.

“Kirkus Prize winners bring us vital messages for our time,” said Kirkus Reviews editor-in-chief Tom Beer. “Messages about the joys of community, the power of self-transformation, and the mutability of historical events - all conveyed through exhilarating prose and pictures.”

With The Slip leading this year’s honors, the Kirkus Prizes once again spotlight books that resonate deeply - perfect companions for the reflective, book-filled days of late autumn.