The year in prizes
1971 Book Award Winners
13 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
V. S. Naipaul won the Booker for In a Free State and Saul Bellow took the National Book Award for Mr. Sammler's Planet. Larry Niven won the Hugo for Ringworld, and Pablo Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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In a Free State
This is a book of five parts that argue with each other rather than a novel in the ordinary sense. A prologue and epilogue drawn from a travel...
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Mr. Sammler's Planet
Artur Sammler is over seventy, tall, one eyed and Polish, a survivor in the exact sense: shot with his wife into a mass grave by the...
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The Rising Sun
John Toland spent years tracking down and interviewing Japanese officers, diplomats, and civilians who had survived the Second World War, and The...
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Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom covers the last five years of Franklin Roosevelt's life, 1940 to 1945, the years in which the president of the...
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Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938
Lawrance Thompson's second volume follows Robert Frost from his 1915 return to the United States, already in his forties and only recently...
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Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom
Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom covers the last five years of Franklin Roosevelt's life, 1940 to 1945, the years in which the president of the...
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The Carrier of Ladders
The Carrier of Ladders gathers poems written as W. S. Merwin moved decisively away from the more traditional verse of his earlier career toward the...
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Ringworld
Louis Wu is two hundred years old, bored, and celebrating his birthday by teleporting round the Earth to stay ahead of midnight, when he is...
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A Time of Changes
On the colony world Borthan the founding settlers left a document called the Covenant, and its central prohibition is grammatical. A person does...
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The Laughing Policeman
On a cold November night in Stockholm, a gunman boards a Stockholm city bus after dark, produces a submachine gun, and shoots down eight of the...
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The Summer of the Swans
Fourteen year old Sara Godfrey is having, by her own dramatic estimation, the worst summer of her life, restless and embarrassed by nearly...
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A Story a Story
Gail Haley retells a West African tale about how Anansi, a small, cunning spider who is really a trickster in disguise, first brought stories down...
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Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is exactly what its title promises, twenty numbered poems of desire and longing followed by one longer poem...
What Shaped 1971
Neruda was a Chilean communist and serving diplomat when he won, and he would die two years later days after the coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. Naipaul's Booker went to a book of linked narratives about displacement in a decolonizing world, the subject he spent his career on and was permanently argued about for. In June 1971 the Pentagon Papers were published and the American government's own account of the Vietnam War was turned against it.
Published in 1971, never won a Pulitzer or Booker
These come from our Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker collection, which explains which prizes we count and the retrospective exception for Fahrenheit 451.
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Curated selectionFear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo drive a rented convertible from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, ostensibly to cover the Mint 400...
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Curated selectionThe Exorcist
Chris MacNeil, an actress filming in Georgetown, notices her twelve year old daughter Regan behaving strangely not long after Regan plays with a...