Award Categories & Recipients
Music Composition
Australian composer Liza Lim has won the 2026 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for her visionary work “A Sutured World.”
“Lim’s work explores themes of unity and healing,” said Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition Director Matthew Ertz, music librarian and associate professor at the University of Louisville’s Anderson Music Library. “Lim’s ability to convey these ideas into the cellist’s intricate and virtuosic passages is astounding and deeply moving.”
World Order
For his work to understand why climate change leads to negative security consequences in some places and not others, Joshua W. Busby, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, will receive the 2026 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Busby presented these ideas in his book, “States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security.”
In the book, Busby explains how the combination of state capacity, political exclusion and international assistance determine the degree to which the impacts of climate change affect security for a country’s citizens.
Religion
Throughout the history of Christianity, the authorship of the New Testament was credited mostly to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul. But hidden behind these men are unnamed coauthors and collaborators. Their work is at the center of biblical scholar Candida Moss’ influential book, “God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible,” the recipient of the 2026 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.
Psychology
Sir Simon Baron-Cohen has received the 2026 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, a distinction described as carrying Nobel Prize-level prestige. He is recognized for pioneering scientific research into the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism.
