The Whiting Foundation announced the winners of their 2025 Whiting Awards for emerging writers Wednesday evening.

The awards, celebrating their 40th year, have helped launch the writing careers of many now well-known authors, including Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, Alice McDermott and Jia Tolentino. Many have gone on to win prestigious literary prizes including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards.

This year's winners come from a diverse array of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and from locations around the country and the world. They are poets, playwrights, novelists, and historians. The winners each receive $50K, with the idea that it will help give them some freedom to hone their craft.

In a statement, Courtney Hodell, Whiting's Director of Literary Programs, said of the group: "These writers demonstrate astounding range; each has invented the tools they needed to carve out their narratives and worlds."

Here are the 2025 Whiting Award Winners:

Shubha Sunder , author of the short story collection Boomtown Girl and the novel Optional Practical Training , whose "storytelling is confident, her prose charged; it compresses the everyday with the kind of force that renders carbon into a jewel."

Sofi Thanhauser , author of Worn: A People's History of Clothing , whose literary journalism conveys a "uniquely elegant intelligence...[Her] curiosity is a gift to the reader; her sentences are as layered as her investigations, which look with a devoted intensity at the objects around us that might otherwise escape our attention."

Annie Wenstrup , Dena'ina poet and author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories , who "interrogates history and its institutions, reminding us that beauty and commerce, nostalgia and revision, the mythic and the quotidian, are not opposites but kin."

Liza Birkenmeier , author of the plays Dr. Ride's American Beach House and Grief Hotel , whose works "begin as languid hangouts and turn into an absurdist supercollider full of swerves and spaces...Wistful and incisive, her plays tuck big ideas inside syncopated fragments of chat that capture the music of how we think and speak now."