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The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources has announced the winners of the 2025 North Carolina Book Awards. The awards ceremony will take place on December 5 at 109 E. Jones St., Raleigh, NC, celebrating North Carolina writers and their contributions to literature. The event begins at 1 p.m. in the ground floor auditorium, and admission is free and open to the public. This year’s ceremony will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Kathleen DuVal, author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, as the keynote speaker. Katherine Scott Crawford won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction for The Miniaturist’s Assistant, and Rob Christensen received the Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction for Southern News, Southern Politics: How a Newspaper Defined a State for a Century. In the poetry category, the Roanoke Chowan Award goes to Crystal Simone Smith for Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound. The NC AAUW Young People’s Literature Awards are split between Carol Baldwin’s Half Truths in the YA literature category and Patrice Gopo’s Ripening Time for children’s literature. The Montford Park Players receive the Hardee Rives Award for Dramatic Arts, and historian Malinda Maynor Lowery wins the Christopher Crittenden Memorial Award for her work on North Carolina history. The George Moses Horton Memorial Award for Significant Contributions to North Carolina Literature will be presented to Carole Boston Weatherford, whose career includes more than 70 published works. These awards highlight the state’s rich literary heritage and the diversity of its writers. For full details on the ceremony and the award winners, visit DNCR’s official website.
