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The 108th Pulitzer Prizes were announced mere minutes ago, and the headline for me is a bit of a surprise in the (for the purposes of this reader) main attraction: the fiction winner.
Here is the full list of winners in the book categories, with the official citations:
Fiction
Winner
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
Citation: “A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.”
Finalists
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li
History
Winner
No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)
Citation: “A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.”
Finalists
American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich (Basic Books)
Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion, by Elliott West (University of Nebraska Press)
Biography (Two winners!)
Winners
King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Citation: A revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination.
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)
Citation: “A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.”
Finalist
Larry McMurtry: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press)
Memoir or Autobiography
Winner
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth)
Citation: “A genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.”
Finalists
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press)
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press)
Poetry
Winner
Tripas: Poems, by Brandon Som (Georgia Review Books)
Citation: “A collection that deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict.”
Finalists
Information Desk: An Epic, by Robyn Schiff (Penguin Books)
To 2040, by Jorie Graham (Copper Canyon Press)
General Nonfiction
Winner
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books)
Citation: “A finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations.”
Finalists
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s Press)
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant (Knopf)
The full announcement list of all winners is here.
