What’s the one thing writers crave even more than unanimous critical acclaim, avalanches of book sales, and the respect envy of their peers? Why, prestigious literary awards of course.
Here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2019.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Awarded for distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.
Prize money: $15,000
The Overstory by Richard Powers
(W.W. Norton & Company)
“..his monumental novel The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size…. The descriptions of this deeply animate place, including a thunderstorm as experienced from 300 feet up, stand with any prose I’ve ever read. I hesitate to tell more, and spoil the immense effort Powers invests in getting us into that primal forest to bear witness … The science in this novel ranges from fun fact to mind-blowing, brought to us by characters—some scientists, mostly not—who are sweet or funny or maddening in all the relatable ways. The major players number more than a dozen, all invested with touching humanity, and they arrive with such convincing, fully formed résumés, it’s hard to resist Googling a couple of them to see if they’re real people.”
–Barbara Kingsolver (The New York Times Book Review)
Finalists:
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Viking)
There There by Tommy Orange (Knopf)
National Book Award
Recognizes an outstanding work of literary fiction by a United States citizen.
Prize money: $10,000
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
(Henry Holt)
“Susan Choi’s thrilling new novel, Trust Exercise, is a rare and splendid literary creature: piercingly intelligent, engrossingly entertaining, and so masterfully intricate that only after you finish it, stunned, can you step back and marvel at the full scope of its unshowy achievementsm … A beautifully textured, impeccably observed tragicomedy with a sense of humor as gleaming as its ire, this is a mighty, meta, #MeToo indictment of the cult of the Great Man, and of what Choi calls—damningly, mockingly—the ‘Elite Brotherhood of the Arts,’ whose members shield one another reflexively … Choi uses the veil of fiction to tell a powerful version of a cultural truth … traces a whole system of protections built around the Great Man. Then we watch those defenses start to fall.”
–Laura Collins-Hughes (The Boston Globe)
Finalists:
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (One World)
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (Riverhead)
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)
Man Booker Prize
Awarded for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.
Prize money: £50,000
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese) and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)
“Atwood responds to the challenge of that familiarity by giving us the narrator we least expect: Aunt Lydia. It’s a brilliant strategic move that turns the world of Gilead inside out … Aunt Lydia’s wry wit…endows The Testaments with far more humor than The Handmaid’s Tale or its exceedingly grim TV adaptation … That’s the genius of Atwood’s creation. Aunt Lydia is a mercurial assassin: a pious leader, a ruthless administrator, a deliciously acerbic confessor … Interlaced among her journal entries are the testimonies of two young women … Their mysterious identities fuel much of the story’s suspense—and electrify the novel with an extra dose of melodrama … The Testaments is not nearly the devastating satire of political and theological misogyny that The Handmaid’s Tale is. In this new novel, Atwood is far more focused on creating a brisk thriller than she is on exploring the perversity of systemic repression … the fact that Atwood keeps challenging such categories is all part of her extraordinary effort to resist the chains we place on each other … Praise be.”
–Ron Charles on The Testaments (The Washington Post)
“…a triumphantly wide-ranging novel, told in a hybrid of prose and poetry, about the struggles, longings, conflicts and betrayals of 12 (mostly) black women and one non-binary character. It’s also, to my mind, the strongest contender on the [Booker shortlist], a big, bold, sexy book that cracks open a world that needs to be known … There’s a freewheeling, exploratory feel to the novel … At times, these fragmented paragraphs read like poetry, at other times like a Whatsapp conversation. All of this could have been schematic, preachy, and the prose can become weighed down by political correctness. But humour always undercuts the woke messages. All the women are morally compromised, most have screwed up somewhere down the line. Evaristo’s job is to observe, to broaden our minds and to be funny—often very funny indeed—about their hypocrisies.”
–Johanna Thomas-Corr on Girl, Woman, Other (The Sunday Times)
Finalists:
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Biblioasis)
An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma (Little Brown)
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafek (Bloomsbury)
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
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi (Oman), translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth
(Catapult)
“The [novel] form’s remarkable adaptability is on brilliant display in Celestial Bodies (Catapult), a searching work of fiction … one of the book’s signal triumphs is that Alharthi has constructed her own novelistic form to suit her specific mimetic requirements … She gives each chapter, in loose rotation, to the voice of a single character, and so makes contemporary female interiority crucial to her book while accommodating a variety of very different world views … the third-person narration devoted to the female characters is so flexible and sensitively alert that you often forget it’s not in the first person … The novel moves back and forth between the generations very flexibly, often in the course of a single page or even paragraph, owing to Alharthi’s deft management of time shifts … Celestial Bodies…seems to break free of narration as it is commonly understood in Western fictional literature. The leaps and swerves seem closer to poetry or fable or song than to the novel as such … One effect of devoting so much space to intensely realized female interiority is to render the women vividly dynamic and mobile—restless, yearning, ambitious—even when reactionary or just maternally sedentary. The form speaks eloquently. Indeed, the great pleasure of reading Celestial Bodies is witnessing a novel argue, through the achieved perfection of its form, for a kind of inquiry that only the novel can really conduct.”
–James Wood (The New Yorker)
Finalists:
The Years by Annie Ernaux (France), translated from the French by Alison L Strayer (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
The Pine Islands by Marion Poschmann (Germany), translated from the German by Jen Calleja (Serpent’s Tail)
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland), translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia), translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press)
The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zeran (Chile), translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (And Other Stories)
National Book Critics Circle Award
Given annually to honor outstanding writing and to foster a national conversation about reading, criticism, and literature. Judged by the volunteer directors of the NBCC who are 24 members serving rotating three-year terms, with eight elected annually by the voting members, namely “professional book review editors and book reviewers.”
Milkman by Anna Burns
(Graywolf)
“For all the simplicity of its setup, Milkman is a richly complex portrayal of a besieged community and its traumatized citizens, of lives lived within many concentric circles of oppression … Among Burns’ singular strengths as a writer is her ability to address the topics of trauma and tyranny with a playfulness that somehow never diminishes the sense of her absolute seriousness … The book’s long sentences, its penchant for the exhaustive, can at times be challenging, and there were stretches where I found its uncanny energies stagnated for too long. But it also seems clear to me that these insistent strategies are in service of the book’s mood of total claustrophobia, and that they contribute to, rather than diminish, its overall effectiveness … There is a pulsating menace at the heart of the book, of which the title character is an uncannily indeterminate avatar, but also a deep sadness at the human cost of conflict … For all the darkness of the world it illuminates, Milkman is as strange and variegated and brilliant as a northern sunset. You just have to turn your face toward it, and give it your full attention.”
–Mark O’Connell (Slate)
Finalists:
Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau (The New Press)
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (Random House)
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown)
Kirkus Prize
Chosen from books reviewed by Kirkus Reviews that earned the Kirkus Star.
Prize money: $50,000
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday)
“… no mere sequel. Despite its focus on a subsequent chapter of black experience, it’s a surprisingly different kind of novel. The linguistic antics that have long dazzled Whitehead’s readers have been set aside here for a style that feels restrained and transparent. And the plot of The Nickel Boys tolerates no fissures in the fabric of ordinary reality; no surreal intrusions complicate the grim progress of this story. That groundedness in the soil of natural life is, perhaps, an implicit admission that the treatment of African Americans has been so bizarre and grotesque that fantastical enhancements are unnecessary … Whitehead reveals the clandestine atrocities of Nickel Academy with just enough restraint to keep us in a state of wincing dread. He’s superb at creating synecdoches of pain … feels like a smaller novel than The Underground Railroad, but it’s ultimately a tougher one, even a meaner one. It’s in conversation with works by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and especially Martin Luther King … what a deeply troubling novel this is. It shreds our easy confidence in the triumph of goodness and leaves in its place a hard and bitter truth about the ongoing American experiment.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
Finalists:
Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis (Knopf)
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami (Pantheon)
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf)
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt (FSG)
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)
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
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
(Algonquin)
“[R]ather than dwell on the moral implications of this violent and false imprisonment of a black man, Jones almost speeds through it; specifics of the arrest and the trial are provided in a matter of paragraphs. The terseness doesn’t make these details any less affecting, but does suggest them as essential context for the dissolving marriage at the novel’s core. Jones’s exploration is a breathtaking look at who and what can be complicit in that breakdown … Her writing illuminates the bits and pieces of a marriage: those almost imperceptible moments that make it, break it, and forcefully tear it apart. Touching on familiar marital aspects (infidelity, stasis, competition), Jones suggests that it is the amalgamation of these things, not any particular isolated instance, that can indelibly fracture a relationship … It becomes head-spinning how Jones upends all expectations, flipping the reader’s perceptions and offering unexpected moments of clarity.”
–Tori Latham (The Atlantic)
Finalists:
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (Doubleday)
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)
Milkman by Anna Burns (Graywolf)
Ordinary People by Diana Evans (Liveright)
Circe by Madeline Miller (Little Brown)
PEN/Faulkner Award
Awarded to the author of the year’s best work of fiction by a living American citizen.
Prize money: $15,000
Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
“With intricacy and humor, Van der Vliet Oloomi relays Zebra’s brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges. In her first novel, Fra Keeler, a psychological thriller about a man who buys a house and is obsessed with the circumstances of the previous owner’s death, she showed similar acuity and dark wit; here, however, she immeasurably expands her terrain. Literature, as Zebra’s father has observed, is ‘a nation without boundaries’ and for this high-minded heroine, ‘landscape and literature are entwined like the helix of DNA.’ But the pilgrimage she undertakes in Call Me Zebra teaches her to raise her eyes and register the reality of the people who exist in her present, not just those who survive in the pages of her past.”
–Liesl Schillinger (The New York Times Book Review)
Finalists:
Tomb of the Unknown Racist by Blanche McCrary Boyd (Counterpoint)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Company)
Love War Stories by Ivelisse Rodriguez (Feminist Press)
Don’t Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin (Harper Perennial)
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
Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin
(Random House)
“Will Mackin’s Bring Out the Dog is one such collection that cuts through all the shiny and hyped-up rhetoric of wartime, and aggressively and masterfully draws a picture of the brutal, frightening, and even boring moments of deployment … The authenticity screams from the pages, with details like how the rained smelled like feces and what blood sounds like dripping off of an elbow onto stone … Mackin’s prose hits every note with accuracy, penning sentences that examine the wonder of the surroundings while also underscoring how alert one must be on these missions … It peels away the hardened layers and shines a spotlight on the vulnerability of every one of them … Mackin’s stories feel present and wholly realized … There is no tidying up of the shameful and disgusting acts that are carried out in war, but with this unflinching honesty comes an unguarded look at the resilience of mankind, and the opportunity to improve.”
–Sara Cutaia (The Chicago Review of Books)
Finalists:
White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar (Dzanc Books)
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Graywolf)
Some Trick by Helen DeWitt (New Directions)
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Awards established in 2012 to recognize the best fiction and nonfiction books for adult readers published in the U.S. in the previous year. Administered by the American Library Association.
Prize money: $5,000 (winner), $1,500 (finalists)
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
(Viking)
“The Great Believers is, as far as I know, among the first novels to chronicle the AIDS epidemic from its initial outbreak to the present—among the first, that is, to convey the terrors and tragedies of the epidemic’s early years as well as its course and its repercussions over the decades. Makkai puts the epidemic (which, of course, has not yet ended) into historical perspective without distancing it or blunting its horrors … It would be futile to try to convey the novel’s considerable population, or its plots and subplots, though both population and plots are ingeniously interwoven. The question ‘What happens next?’ remains pressing from the first page to the last … Although I can’t help wishing the two stories had worked together more potently, that doesn’t detract from the deep emotional impact of The Great Believers, nor does it diminish Makkai’s accomplishment. She has borne unblinking witness to history and to a horrific episode already in danger—among Americans, that is—of becoming a horror story out of the past.”
–Michael Cunningham (The New York Times Book Review)
Finalists:
There There by Tommy Orange (Knopf)
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Knopf)
International DUBLIN Literary Award
An international literary award presented each year for a novel written in English or translated into English.
Prize money: €100,000
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
(Random House)
“…[a] shatteringly original debut … Each character’s voice is real and authentic, rendered with hypnotic precision. … You could read Idaho just for the sheer beauty of the prose, the expert way Ruskovich makes everything strange and yet absolutely familiar. There is the sullen, oppressive heat, the lush verdant green of the forest, and the smothering cover of snow. There are ‘the drippy pines, the mulchy ground.’ She startles with images so fresh, they make you see the world anew … Idaho’s brilliance is in its ability to not to tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life—but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us.”
–Caroline Leavitt (The San Francisco Chronicle)
Finalists:
Compass by Mathias Énard (New Directions)
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (Atlantic Monthly Press)
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead)
Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty (W.W. Norton & Company)
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (Catapult)
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (Hogarth)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Random House)
A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert (Pantheon)
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead)
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
In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
(Bloomsbury)
“From the first page, Winslow establishes an uncanny authority and profound tone that belie the book’s debut status. The precision and charm of his language lure us in and soothe us … He paints a community so tightknit and thorough it becomes easy to forget the people in it don’t exist … Knot is as complex and endearing a protagonist as Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie. And Winslow is capable of retreating into the quiet of all of his characters’ minds and hearts and sharing the contents with us … Much of the story is told through dialogue, rich and truthful conversations … Like Dickens’s, Winslow’s characters are steeped in secrets, but here the reader knows most of them; the reader’s satisfaction doesn’t come from what will unfold, but from how it will.”
–Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (The New York Times Book Review)
Finalists:
The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin (FSG)
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf)
Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad (Riverhead)
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin)
Fall Back Down When I Die by Joe Wilkins (Little Brown)
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (Random House)
Edgar Award
Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, honoring the best in crime and mystery fiction.
(Best Novel)
Down the River Unto the Sea by Walter Mosley
(Mulholland Books)
“Joe King Oliver, the protagonist of his new novel Down the River Unto the Sea, is a black ex-cop who was framed for the rape of a white woman. The premise alone is enough fuel for hours of classroom discussion. Add in a wise teenage daughter, a devilish antihero partner and a death-row inmate inspired by Mumia Abu-Jamal, and we have a wild ride that delivers hard-boiled satisfaction while toying with our prejudices and preconceptions … Despite its serious subject matter, Down the River Unto the Sea is an optimistic noir. A fitting work for a world riddled with dark contradictions.”
–Steph Cha (The Los Angeles Times)
Finalists:
The Liar’s Girl by Catherine Ryan Howard (Blackstone Publishing)
House Witness by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press)
A Gambler’s Jury by Victor Methos (Thomas & Mercer)
Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth)
A Treacherous Curse by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
(Best First Novel)
Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin
(Ecco)
“It’s a slow-burn by design, a tale of suspense that reels you in through McLaughlin’s scrupulous skill. There’s no escaping the mountainous isolation enveloping Rice, and as the novel pushes forward and stakes a claim in richer psychological territory, there’s no escaping the man’s tortured mind, either … Ostensibly a character study, Bearskin is most satisfying as a philosophical investigation of man and nature, washed in noir … it’d be better off without its most familiar beats, its reverting to genre expectations. But when its imagery, so stark and often poetic, takes center stage, Bearskin is elegiac, hypnotic—unshakable.”
–David Canfield (Entertainment Weekly)
Finalists:
The Captives by Debra Immergut (Ecco)
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy by Nova Jacobs (Touchstone Books)
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
A Knife in the Fog by Bradley Harper (Seventh Street Books)
Nebula Award
Given each year by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for the best science fiction or fantasy novel.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
(Tor)
“…a meteorite strikes Earth, causing a global cataclysm. The eastern coast of the U.S. crumbles, and the rest of the world faces a climate shift. A former WASP pilot and mathematician, Elma York works for the International Aerospace Coalition…expediting efforts to colonize other planets. Kowal once again strikes a fine balance of integrating historical accuracy—including mid-twentieth-century sexism, racism, and technology—with speculative storytelling. Readers will root for Elma as she breaks barriers and calculates lifesaving equations, all while dealing with sometimes-crippling anxiety. Recommend to fans of realistic sf.”
–Biz Hyzy (Booklist)
Finalists:
The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang (Harper Voyager)
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller (Ecco)
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Witchmark by C. L. Polk (Tor)
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press)
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 Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
(Tor)
“The novel’s greatest strength to me lies in its quietness—I know it probably sounds strange to hear this considering The Calculating Stars deals with topics as grand as an apocalyptic event, space exploration as well as overt systemic sexism and racism. However, it is Elma’s internal struggles with all of those that inform the story. From her sense of self-worth which wavers between a lack of confidence…and her obvious intellect, to her ongoing struggle with anxiety…from her unwavering belief that women wholly belong in the space program…to her blind spots with regards to women of color (white feminism is a thing and this book does not shy away from showing Elma’s ignorance and privilege).”
–Ana Grilo (Kirkus)
Finalists:
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (Harper Voyager)
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris Books)
Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press)
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente (Saga Press)
Bram Stoker Award
Presented by the Horror Writers Association for “superior achievement” in horror writing for novels.
The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
(William Morrow)
“Read Paul Tremblay’s new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, and you might not sleep for a week. Longer. It will shape your nightmares for months–that’s pretty much guaranteed. That’s what it’s built for. And there’s a very, very good chance you’ll never get it out of your head again … I want to tell you everything about it. I want to detail every switchback and psychological reverse that happens, deconstruct how Tremblay layers in these genius feints of paranoia and disbelief, explain how he builds to these perfect trigger points where everything explodes into blood and violence, then settles, then starts again. I want to, but I can’t. It would ruin it. There is a meticulousness to The Cabin that depends entirely on the slow reveal; on the tension of misunderstanding and inherent bias.”
–Jason Sheehan (NPR)
The Hunger by Alma Katsu (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Glimpse by Jonathan Maberry (St. Martin’s Press)
Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman (Del Rey)
Dracul by J. D. Barker and Dacre Stoker (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
