Last month, the Pulitzer Prize winners for 2015 were announced. Out of the 2,500 entries received this year only 22 were awarded prizes, five of which were books written by first-time Pulitzer Prize winners.

You can check out any of the 2015 prize-winning titles from the JMRL catalog:

Fiction: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.

History: Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People by Elizabeth A. Fenn – Draws on important discoveries in a range of disciplines to chronicle the history of the Mandan Native Americans while sharing perspectives about their thriving commercial and agricultural practices before European diseases decimated their culture.

Biography: The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer – Analyzes the relationship between Pius XI and the notorious Italian dictator, tracing how after coming into power in the same year they forged covert ties to one another to consolidate power and pursue political goals.

Nonfiction: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert – Drawing on the work of geologists, botanists, marine biologists and other researchers, an award-winning writer for The New Yorker discusses the five devastating mass extinctions on earth and predicts the coming of a sixth.

Poetry: Digest by Gregory Pardlo – From Epicurus to Sam Cooke, the Daily News to Roots, Digest draws from the present and the past to form an intellectual, American identity. In poems that forge their own styles and strategies, we experience dialogues between the written word and other art forms. Within this dialogue we hear Ben Jonson, we meet police K-9s, and we find children negotiating a sense of the world through a father’s eyes and through their own.