Announcing 2026 IWF International Hall of Fame Awards Honoree

It is our great pleasure to announce IWF’s 2026 International Hall of Fame honoree, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and presidential scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her work has shaped public understanding of American leadership and democracy for more than five decades.

Since 1985, the IWF Hall of Fame awards have been the most important annual event for IWF, honoring women tackling issues facing the world. Awardees are transformative leaders whose contributions to society are outsized on a global scale.

Goodwin is the author of nine critically acclaimed bestselling works, including Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which served in part as the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award®-winning film Lincoln. Team of Rivals received the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History. In 2016, Goodwin became the first historian awarded the Lincoln Leadership Prize from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation.

Goodwin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Her book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism received the Carnegie Medal for the best nonfiction book of 2013 and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was adapted into an award-winning ABC television miniseries. Her eighth book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, published in Spring 2024, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.

Goodwin has received numerous awards, including the inaugural American History Book Prize from the New-York Historical Society, the Gold Medal for biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and most recently the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence from the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York for An Unfinished Love Story.

We are excited to honor Doris Kearns Goodwin and hear her perspective on leadership at the upcoming IWF World Leadership Conference in Denver, Navigating Peaks and Valleys: Leading amid Uncertainty.