2025 GOTHAM BOOK PRIZE
WINNERS
“This year, we are proud to award the Gotham Book Prize to two outstanding works of non-fiction that combine rigorous research with a unique point of view to illuminate the rich and complex history that makes New York City great. In Paradise Bronx, Ian Frazier has written a compelling narrative that sweeps the reader up in the pulsing culture, diverse lives, and fascinating past and present of our northernmost borough. In Movement, Nicole Gelinas masterfully unpacks the people and politics that have influenced our transportation networks, and their immense influence on our current moment and shared future. The Gotham Book Prize launched during the challenges of the pandemic, and we are thrilled that five years later, we can award two books that will inspire curious and creative thinkers for generations to come.”
- Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson, co-founders of the Gotham Book Prize
“These two works – each inimitable in its own way, each so different in style, tone and texture, yet each imbued with a boundless if not uncritical love for its subject – explore facets of New York City that have been hiding in plain sight for decades now, if not for generations. Picking up where Robert Caro left off in his landmark work on Robert Moses, Nicole Gelinas’ meticulously researched and landmark text tells the story of how New York has fought to save itself from the automobile over the last fifty years – a tale situated at the crossroads of virtually every existential issue – political, social, economic, infrastructural, climatic – confronting New York and urban places everywhere in the 21st century. And then there’s Ian Frazier, of whom it can be said, as the humorist S. J. Perelman once said – writing of himself in the third person – ‘They broke the mold before they made him.’ Frazier has written what no one has ever thought to write before: a vast, picaresque, dizzyingly unpredictable and gripping portrait of the Bronx, a place which Frazier calls – throwing down the gauntlet right at the start – ‘New York’s Greatest Borough.’ With the same obsessive drive that two decades back made him snag plastic bags from city trees and write about it, Frazier goes everywhere in space and time the Bronx has to offer. And if – as one does in a different way with Nicole Gelinas’ text – one exits Paradise Bronx with a dazed sense of not being in Kansas anymore – it’s hard not to be convinced – as Frazier himself says in the closing words of this urban Odyssey – ‘that New York City is the closest thing to a Shining City I’ve got to offer.’”
— Ric Burns, documentary filmmaker and member of the Gotham Book Prize Jury