The year in prizes
1972 Book Award Winners
14 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer for Angle of Repose and John Berger won the Booker for G. Barbara W. Tuchman took the non fiction prize for her study of Stilwell in China, and Heinrich Böll received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Angle of Repose
Lyman Ward is fifty eight, a historian, and his body has stopped cooperating. A bone disease has taken one leg and locked his neck so that he...
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G.
G. is the son of an Italian merchant and an Englishwoman, born illegitimate and taken as a child to England. He grows up detached from everyone,...
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The Complete Stories
Thirty one stories, everything Flannery O'Connor wrote in the form, from her 1947 master's thesis pieces to the stories she was revising on her...
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Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45
Barbara Tuchman builds the book that won her a second Pulitzer around General Joseph Stilwell, nicknamed Vinegar Joe for his temper and blunt...
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Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
Carl N. Degler compares two societies built on slavery, Brazil and the United States, to explain why they emerged from it with such different...
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Eleanor and Franklin
Eleanor and Franklin is the story of a marriage that shaped a century, told by a man who knew one of its partners as well as anyone alive. Joseph...
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Eleanor and Franklin
Eleanor and Franklin is the story of a marriage that shaped a century, told by a man who knew one of its partners as well as anyone alive. Joseph...
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Collected Poems
Collected Poems brings together James Wright's work from his formal debut, The Green Wall, chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1956 and...
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To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Every human being who ever lived, some thirty six billion of them, wakes at once on the banks of a river that runs for millions of miles across an...
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The Gods Themselves
A scientist discovers that a lump of tungsten in his laboratory has become plutonium 186, an isotope that cannot exist under the physical laws of...
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The Day of the Jackal
The premise is a matter of record: in the early 1960s the OAS, the terrorist rump of France's Algerian war, tried repeatedly to assassinate Charles...
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Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Mrs Frisby, a widowed field mouse raising four children alone in a cinder block near a farmer's field, faces a crisis on two fronts: her son...
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One Fine Day
Nonny Hogrogian retells an old Armenian folktale about a fox caught helping himself to a bowl of milk left out by an old woman; furious, she grabs...
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The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
Katharina Blum, a precise and private young housekeeper, meets a man named Ludwig Götten at a carnival party in an unnamed German city and spends...
What Shaped 1972
Berger used his Booker acceptance speech to attack the sponsor's origins in Caribbean plantation labor and gave half the prize money to the British Black Panthers, which remains the most confrontational thing anyone has done with a literary award. Böll's Nobel honored a writer who had spent his career examining what ordinary Germans had done and failed to do. Burglars were arrested at the Watergate in June, Nixon went to China in February, and eleven Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics.
Published in 1972, 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 selectionInvisible Cities
Marco Polo describes fifty five imagined cities, each given a woman's name, to an aging Kublai Khan, who is trying, through these reports, to...
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Curated selectionSurfacing
An unnamed narrator, an illustrator, returns from Toronto to the remote Quebec island where she grew up, searching for her father, who has vanished...