Pulitzer Prize
Awarded for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.
Prize money: $15,000
Less by Andrew Sean Greer (Lee Boudreaux Books)
“…[a] thoroughly delightful novel … Greer is an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy … Greer is brilliantly funny about the awkwardness that awaits a traveling writer of less repute … Whether he’s pining after an old lover or creeping along a ledge four flights up, hoping to climb through the window of his locked apartment, this is the comedy of disappointment distilled to a sweet elixir. Greer’s narration, so elegantly laced with wit, cradles the story of a man who loses everything: his lover, his suitcase, his beard, his dignity.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
Finalists:
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Penguin Press)
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press)
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National Book Award
Recognizes an outstanding work of literary fiction by a United States citizen.
Prize money: $10,000
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead)
“I was drawn to her [Sigrid Nunez’s] sixth novel as a fresh addition to the literature of grief, but within pages realized The Friend has as much to say about literature as about grief, and was wondering how she’d slipped below my radar … Nunez deftly turns this potentially mawkish story into a penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory, what it means to be a writer today, and various forms of love and friendship — including between people and their pets. All in a taut 200 pages …a mini-Nunez festival for me, which offered ample evidence that it’s no fluke. In fact, this nuanced, exceptionally literary novel about devotion is a natural outgrowth of Sempre Susan…’The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?’ As her narrator confronts multiple losses, Nunez’s affecting novel probes the issue closely.”
–Heller McAlpin (NPR)
Finalists:
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Graywolf)
Florida by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson (Soho)
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
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Man Booker Prize
Awarded for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.
Prize money: £50,000
Milkman by Anna Burns (Graywolf)
“Burns’s agenda is not to unpack the dreary tribal squabbles that so characterised Troubles-era Northern Ireland; rather she is working in an altogether more interesting milieu, seeking answers to the big questions about identity, love, enlightenment and the meaning of life for a young woman on the verge of adulthood … in its intricate domestic study of a disparate family there are agreeable echoes of Chekov, Tolstoy and Turgenev … it is an impressive, wordy, often funny book and confirms Anna Burns as one of our rising literary stars.”
–Adrian McKinty (The Irish Times)
Finalists:
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Knopf)
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson (Graywolf)
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)
The Long Take by Robin Robertson (Knopf)
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Man Booker International Prize
Awarded for a single book in English translation published in the UK.
Prize money: £50,000, divided equally between the author and the translator
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Jennifer Croft (Riverhead)
It is a novel of intuitions as much as ideas, a cacophony of voices and stories seemingly unconnected across time and space, which meander between the profound and the facetious, the mysterious and the ordinary, and whose true register remains one of glorious ambiguity … Flights has echoes of WG Sebald, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš and Dubravka Ugrešić, but Tokarczuk inhabits a rebellious, playful register very much her own … Flights is a passionate and enchantingly discursive plea for meaningful connectedness.”
–Kapka Kassabova (The Guardian)
Finalists:
Virginie Despentes (France), Frank Wynne, Vernon Subutex 1 (MacLehose Press)
Han Kang (South Korea), Deborah Smith, The White Book (Hogarth)
László Krasznahorkai (Hungary), John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet & George Szirtes, The World Goes On (New Directions)
Antonio Muñoz Molina (Spain), Camilo A. Ramirez, Like a Fading Shadow (FSG)
Ahmed Saadawi (Iraq), Jonathan Wright, Frankenstein in Baghdad (Penguin)
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National Book Critics Circle Award
Given annually to honor outstanding writing and to foster a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature.
Improvement by Joan Silber
“In keeping with the Berger-esque philosophy, Silber writes her new novel, Improvement, as a series of interlinked stories, a generous structural decision that both allows characters to fully inhabit their own narratives and gives space to the lives that intersect or run parallel to them … Just as you think you’ve understood the narrative technique, which takes us into Reyna’s life through her relationships, Part II commences, shifting to third-person stories that seem to spool farther and farther away from Reyna…With a single tug on the narrative thread, we return to Reyna’s world…but this time we read her and her world differently, having passed through all these other stories that intersect hers, both literally and thematically. This is a novel of richness and wisdom and huge pleasure. Silber knows, and reveals, how close we live to the abyss, but she also revels in joy, particularly the joy that comes from intimate relationships.”
–Kamila Shamsie (The New York Times Book Review)
Finalists:
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid,
The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
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Kirkus Prize
Chosen from books reviewed by Kirkus Reviews that earned the Kirkus Star.
Prize money: $50,000
Severance by Ling Ma (FSG)
“Is it possible to imagine a future that isn’t at least somewhat tinged by the feverish traces of our collective past? It certainly becomes difficult to do so while reading Ma’s novel, in which all of life—whether before or after the apocalypse, in America or in China—is rendered through the same devastatingly lyrical prose … Severance is the most gorgeously written novel I’ve read all year; when I finished it, I immediately picked it up and read it all over again.”
–Jane Hu (The New Republic)
Finalists:
Halsey Street by Naima Coster (Little A)
Florida by Lauren Groff (Riverhead)
Mourning by Eduardo Halfon (Bellevue)
Heads of the Colored People (Atria)
Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams (Riverhead)
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Women’s Prize for Fiction
Awarded to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom.
Prize money: £30,000
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead)
“Shamsie, who has matured as global citizen and international writer in the age of social media, goes beyond mere plot adaptation to explore the nature of storytelling itself: who gets to tell the story, how will the story get retold, which story might last to become history … Although just one in a substantial library of Antigones through centuries, cultures, and countries, Shamsie’s latest is a compelling, stupendous stand-out to be witnessed, honored, and deeply commended.”
–Terry Hong (The Christian Science Monitor)
Finalists:
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (Penguin)
The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar (Harper)
Sight by Jessie Greengrass (Hogarth)
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic Books)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
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PEN/Faulkner Award
Awarded to the author of the year’s best work of fiction by a living American citizen.
Prize money: $15,000
Improvement by Joan Silber (Counterpoint)
“As the narrative weaves through its global roundelay — from Dieter’s romantic entanglements back in Germany to Bruno’s estranged daughter Monika’s art research in New York and Claude’s sister Lynnette’s dreams of opening her own eyebrow salon — characters new and old struggle with the central question: How does one evade responsibility for the uncomfortable results of one’s actions and choices, while retaining the comforting illusion of having any control at all over one’s destiny? … Improvement is a marvel of dimensionality, an astute, lyrical portrait of characters linked by their limits and their truths, by the choices that have shaped their lives, and by the destinies they have tried so hard to construct.”
–Tara Ison (The Los Angeles Review of Books)
Finalists:
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press)
The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt (FSG Originals)
The Tower of the Antilles by Achy Obejas (Akashic Books)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
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PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
Awarded to an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.
Prize money: $25,000
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang (Lenny)
“Jenny Zhang’s astounding short-story collection, Sour Heart, combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain … The collection’s organizing theme is familial love that warps a person beyond all recognition: specifically, a type of immigrant devotion with a power that is both creative and entropic, and which affects its recipients in idiosyncratic ways … Until now, Zhang has been better known for poetry and essays, but she has a background in fiction and she has a knack for deploying and combining common literary devices for mischievous, unexpected ends.”
–Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
Finalists:
Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi (Soho)
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes by Venita Blackburn (University of Nebraska Press)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove)
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf)
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IMPAC Award
An international literary award presented each year for a novel written in English or translated into English.
Prize money: €100,000
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Soho)
“Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes … Among its many structural and technical virtues, everything in the book is recalled, but none of it is monotonous … The book is a hymn to modern small-town life, then, with its ‘rites, rhythms and rituals / upholding the world like solar bones,’ as well as an indictment of human greed and stupidity, and how places and cultures respond to the circumstances beyond their control and yet of their own making … The magnificent song that is Solar Bonespossesses such peculiar depth, such consonances and dissonances that it is a reminder that a writer of talent can seemingly take any place, any set of characters, any situation and create from them a total vision of the reality. This is a book about Mayo, Ireland, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe.”
–Ian Samson (The Guardian)
Finalists:
Baba Dunja’s Last Love by Alina Bronsky, trans. by Tim Mohr (Europa)
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera, trans. by Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories)
The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen, trans. by Don Bartlett and and Don Shaw (MacLehose Press)
Human Acts by Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith (Hogarth)
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride (Hogarth)
Distant Light by Antonio Moresco, trans. by Richard Dixon (Archipelago)
Ladivine by Marie NDiaye, trans. by Jordan Stump (Knopf)
The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso (Picador)
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
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Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
An annual award presented by The Center for Fiction, a non-profit organization in New York City, for the best debut novel.
Prize money: $10,000
There There by Tommy Orange (Knopf)
“In Tommy Orange’s There There, an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters … Orange makes Oakland into a ‘there’ that becomes all the more concretely, emphatically and fully so in a novel that deals, in tones that are sweeping and subtle, large-gestured and nuanced, with what the notion of belonging means for Native Americans … The novel, then, is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now, for a sense of vast dispossession to live beside day-to-day misery and poverty. Nothing in Orange’s world is simple, least of all his characters and his sense of the relationship between history and the present. Instead, a great deal is subtle and uncertain in this original and complex novel.”
–Colm Tóibín (The New York Times Book Review)
Finalists:
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday (Simon & Schuster)
Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg (One World)
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (Grove)
The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat (Henry Holt)
Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin (Scribner)
Trenton Makes by Tadzio Koelb (Doubleday)
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Nebula Award
Given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for the best science fiction or fantasy novel.
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
“…the fact that The Stone Sky sticks the landing of this astonishing trilogy with timeliness and rigor is the smallest, simplest thing I have to say about it. The gratitude and love I feel for these books, and for what The Stone Sky adds to the triptych, is staggering … From a storytelling perspective, The Stone Sky satisfied me completely. With the same fiercely compelling voice and character work that made the first two volumes so eminently devourable, it travels deeply difficult terrain and emerges triumphant … If the Broken Earth trilogy as a whole shows a world where cataclysm and upheaval is the norm, The Stone Sky interrogates what right worlds built on oppression and genocide have to exist … I don’t want to stop talking about this story. I don’t want to count words. Let me leave it at this: The depth and breadth of Jemisin’s achievement with this trilogy is geologic. These books are a revolution in which I want to take part.”
–Amal El-Mohtar (NPR)
Finalists:
Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory (Knopf)
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
Jade City by Fonda Lee (Orbit)
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (Tor)
Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor)
The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss (Saga Press)
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Edgar Award
Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, honoring the best in crime and mystery fiction.
(Best Novel)
Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke (Mulholland)
“Attica Locke pens a poignant love letter to the lazy red-dirt roads and Piney Woods that serve as a backdrop to a noir thriller as murky as the bayous and bloodlines that thread through the region … Locke stitches a tale of murder and bloodlust, forbidden love, family ties and a violent racial history that bleed into the narrative of East Texas like the mournful moan of a Lightnin’ Hopkins song … just when you think this race-centered saga will play out like most others, Locke shows off her chops as a superb storyteller who spent three years in the writers’ room of Empire. She is adept at crafting characters who don’t easily fit the archetypes of good and evil, but exist in the thick grayness of humanness, the knotty demands of loyalties and the baseness of survival. Locke holds up the mirror of the racial debate in America and shows us how the light bends and fractures what is right, wrong and what simply is the way it is—but perhaps not as it should be.”
–Jaundréa Clay (The Houston Chronicle)
Finalists:
The Dime by Kathleen Kent (Mulholland)
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr (Penguin Random House / Marian Wood Books / Putnam)
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus)
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti (Dial Press)
(Best First Novel)
She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper (Ecco)
“That, in short, is a talented author at the peak of his game delivering a fast-paced, gritty, ultraviolent narrative that, more than put him on the crime map, should rocket him into the upper echelons of contemporary noir … Polly and Nate are engaging characters on their own, but work best as a duo. Harper’s deceptively simple plot allows him to use his characters as vehicles to explore trust, loyalty, fatherhood, coping mechanisms in the face of a major loss, and even the need for violence …Harper seems to possess a deep understanding of how violence works and the way it affects people …She Rides Shotgun is a debut novel, but that doesn’t mean Harper can’t be called a master. Calling him a ‘new’ author isn’t exactly accurate, so master does the job pretty well.”
–Gabino Iglesias (Vol. 1 Brooklyn)
Finalists:
Dark Chapter by Winnie M. Li (Polis)
Lola by Melissa Scrivner Love (Crown)
Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy (Macmillan/Flatiron)
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich (Random House)
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Hugo Award
Awarded for the best science fiction or fantasy story of 40,000 words or more published in English or translated in the prior calendar year.
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)
“As the conclusion to a trilogy that started strong and then stopped, The Stone Sky gave me everything that I wanted, and then it gave me more. It’s devastating. Poignant and personal and almost impossibly powerful. If my faith in N. K. Jemisin as one of our generation’s most able creators was in any way shaken by The Obelisk Gate—and I confess that it was, somewhat—then The Stone Sky has decimated those doubts. The Broken Earth is in totality one of the great trilogies of our time, and if all is well with the world, its thoroughly thrilling third volume should surely secure N. K. Jemisin a third Hugo Award.”
–Niall Alexander (Tor)
Finalists:
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi (Tor)
Provenance by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
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Bram Stoker Award
Presented by the Horror Writers Association for “superior achievement” in horror writing for novels.
Ararat by Christopher Golden (St. Martin’s)
“The whole is more than the sum of its parts in this exceptional supernatural thriller. An avalanche on Turkey’s legendary Mount Ararat uncovers a cave that may contain the remnants of Noah’s Ark….While the contours of the story line will be familiar to genre fans, Golden makes them feel fresh through solid prose, effective characterizations, and a willingness not to pull any plot punches.”
Finalists:
Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King (Scribner)
Black Mad Wheel by Josh Malerman (Ecco)
I Wish I Was Like You by S.P. Miskowski (JournalStone)
Ubo by Steve Rasnic Tem (Solaris)
