Today at 3PM (EST), from Columbia University in New York City, the winners of the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes will be announced. Yes, in just a few short hours, 20+ writers, journalists, and composers will find their careers inexorably altered, and their bank accounts $15,000 richer.

Last year we took you on a trip down memory lane with a look back at Every Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner of the 21st Century, and now it’s the turn of the General Nonfiction category.

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2018

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr.

“…[a] superb and shattering first book … That is truly what this book is about, and what makes it tragic to the bone: How people, acting with the finest of intentions and theknow it—a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today.”

–Dexter Filkins (The New York Times Book Review)

2006

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins

“The catalog of cruelty Elkins uncovered—bits from surviving documents, more from interviewing survivors—makes for quite nauseating reading that descends the slope of depravity from torture to outright killing. Inevitably news of incidents leaked out, igniting parliamentary rows in London, which Elkins chronicles with contained fury. Filling a previously blank page in history, Elkins’ pioneering study is a crucial recording of Kenyan history in particular, and that of African decolonization in general.”

–Gilbert Taylor (Booklist)

2005

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet