Gotham Book Prize Announces 2025 Winners: Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough (FSG) by Ian Frazier and Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car (Fordham University Press) by Nicole Gelinas.
The fifth-annual, $50,000 Gotham Book Prize is awarded to the author of the best book set in or about New York City; For second time, prize to be split between two winners. Previous winners include Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (2024), The Sewing Girl’s Tale by John Wood Sweet (2023), Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana (2023), Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott (2022), Deacon King Kong by James McBride (2021)
NEW YORK, May 19, 2025 — Today, the Gotham Book Prize, an annual award first created in the early months of the pandemic to encourage and honor writing about New York City, announced the winners of its fifth-annual prize: Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough by Ian Frazier and Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back It Streets from the Car by Nicole Gelinas. The two winners, as selected by a jury made up of leading New Yorkers and authors, will split the $50,000 prize.
The Gotham Book Prize was created in mid-2020 by Bradley Tusk — the founder of independent bookstore P&T Knitwear on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — and Howard Wolfson to recognize the culture that has made New York City special for generations, and to uplift the creative community during the challenging early months of the pandemic. The $50,000 Gotham Book Prize is awarded annually to the best book published that calendar year — either fiction or nonfiction — that either is about New York City or takes place in New York City.
“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 omplex history that makes New York City great,” said Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson, co-founders of the Gotham Book Prize. 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.”
“As a New York City patriot, I’m delighted and honored to co-win this award. I owe it all to the greatest borough, the Bronx!” said Ian Frazier, author of Paradise Bronx.
“I am honored that Movement has shared in winning this year’s Gotham Book Prize, and even more honored to share this award with Ian Frazier’s Paradise Bronx, a terrific book that shows, as my book also does, how important the government’s transportation choices, including whether and where to build highways, are to New Yorkers’ everyday quality of life,” said Nicole Gelinas, author of Movement. “I am deeply grateful to Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson, as well as to P&T Knitwear, for supporting books about New York City. Understanding local history, and the continued impact of long-ago local choices on our lives today, is just as important to making better-informed choices in the future as is understanding national and international history.”
In Paradise Bronx: The Life And Times Of New York’s Greatest Borough (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ian Frazier crafts a deeply personal portrait based on his fifteen years of walking the streets of this vibrant, diverse, and storied borough. Frazier brings to life the Bronx’s rich history—from Revolutionary War battlegrounds, to neighborhoods with immigrants from every corner of the globe, to the rise of the Yankees and the birth of hip-hop. With wit and warmth, Frazier explores the borough’s many reinventions, celebrating the cultural energy, resilience, and community spirit that make the Bronx a vital part of the American, and New York City, story. Ian Frazier has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1974, when he published his first piece in The Talk of the Town. A year later, the magazine ran his first short story, “The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo.” Since then, he has published numerous short stories, as well as nonfiction, Shouts & Murmurs, and Talk of the Town pieces, in the magazine. In 2012, he revived the annual Christmas poem, “Greetings, Friends!,” originated by Frank Sullivan in 1933. Frazier’s books include “Great Plains” (which ran as a three-part series in the magazine), “Family,” “On the Rez,” and “Travels in Siberia.” He has twice won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, for his collections “Dating Your Mom” (1985) and “Lamentations of the Father” (2008). His other books include “Cranial Fracking” (2021).
In Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car (Fordham University Press), Nicole Gelinas reveals how streets solely dedicated to cars have failed New York City and how revitalizing our transit below ground and the streetscape above can power our future — especially as we recover from the pandemic. Picking up where Robert Caro’s The Power Broker left off, Gelinas uncovers the forgotten victories that laid the groundwork for Jane Jacobs and generations of transportation advocates to come. In exploring decades of activism, policy fights, and infrastructure battles, Gelinas provides a unique and fascinating chronicle of urban politics and the ramifications that our built environment has on our everyday lives across the five boroughs today.
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. She writes on urban policy and politics, ranging widely on matters such as transportation, public safety, infrastructure, and public finance. Gelinas is a Chartered Financial Analyst charterholder and the author of Movement: New York’s Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car. She has published analysis and opinion pieces in the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Gelinas holds a B.A. in English literature from Tulane University.
Howard Wolfson works for Bloomberg Philanthropies, serving as its Education program lead and also runs former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Super PAC. Bradley Tusk is a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist, and author. The two became friends while working on Mayor Bloomberg’s 2009 re-election campaign. In May 2022, Tusk opened a new independent bookstore and NYC’s only free podcast studio, P&T Knitwear, on the Lower East Side, named after a 1950s garment shop operated by his grandfather on Allen Street after surviving the Holocaust and immigrating from a displaced persons camp in Germany.
“In our fifth year of celebrating New York City and the Gotham Book Prize, we were once again presented with an embarrassment of riches. There are so many New Yorks, so many stories to tell, so many boroughs and neighborhoods to explore, and an impossible number of policies to analyze. There were a diverse multitude of stories from a myriad of talented authors this year, and I am so thankful I was able to spend time engaging their work. The vision and generosity of Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson in putting together the Gotham Book Prize reminds me of how truly great this city is, has been, and will be hopefully forever more,” said Dr. Christina Greer, Associate Professor of Political Science, Fordham University and member of the Gotham Book Prize jury.
“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,” said Ric Burns, documentary filmmaker and member of the Gotham Book Prize Jury. “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.’”
“Nicole Gelinas’ Movement is an important book that explains how mass transit systems have been planned, financed and built in New York City over the past 100 years. She carefully analyzes the way in which political forces have and continue to shape the growth of mass transit. This is a ‘must read’ for planners, decision makers and all those who care about New York’s future in the 21st century” said Mitchell Moss, NYU Professor of Urban Policy and Planning and member of the Gotham Book Prize jury.
For more informations contact: cory@ptknitwear.com
