The year in prizes
1973 Book Award Winners
14 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Eudora Welty won the Pulitzer for The Optimist's Daughter and J. G. Farrell won the Booker for The Siege of Krishnapur. Arthur C. Clarke took the Nebula for Rendezvous with Rama, and Patrick White became the first Australian to win the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Optimist's Daughter
Judge McKelva is seventy one and has a detached retina, and his daughter Laurel comes down from Chicago to sit with him through the operation in...
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The Siege of Krishnapur
In 1857 the British residents of the fictional Indian station of Krishnapur find themselves besieged in the Residency by sepoys of their own army....
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Augustus
Octavius is nineteen, studying abroad, when word comes that his great uncle Julius Caesar has been murdered in Rome, and that the will names him...
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Chimera
Three novellas, three myths, and one question run through all of them: what does a storyteller do when the story is over? Dunyazadiad retells the...
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Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
Robert Coles began the research behind Children of Crisis in 1960, when he met Ruby Bridges, the six year old girl who was, that year, the only...
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Fire in the Lake
Frances FitzGerald argues that the Vietnam War was, at its core, a collision between two entirely different ways of understanding the world,...
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People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization
Michael Kammen argues that Americans have never actually resolved the contradictions at the center of their own political culture, and that those...
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Luce and His Empire
W. A. Swanberg's biography follows Henry Luce from his 1898 birth in Tengchow, in Shandong Province, China, the son of American Presbyterian...
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George Washington: Anguish and Farewell
Anguish and Farewell is the fourth and final volume of James Thomas Flexner's life of George Washington, and it covers the years no earlier...
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Up Country
Up Country: Poems of New England, New and Selected gathers Maxine Kumin's poems of rural New Hampshire life, farm labor, weather, and the animals...
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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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Rendezvous with Rama
In 2131 an object enters the solar system on a hyperbolic path. It is fifty kilometers long, twenty across, perfectly cylindrical, spinning, and...
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The Lingala Code
Léopoldville in the early 1960s: the Congo newly independent, Lumumba murdered, the UN and the CIA and the mining interests all working the same...
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Julie of the Wolves
Miyax, a thirteen year old Inupiat girl who also answers to her English name Julie, sets out walking across the Alaskan tundra toward San...
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The Funny Little Woman
Arlene Mosel adapts a Japanese folktale, drawing on a version the writer Lafcadio Hearn had recorded in 1902, about a cheerful old woman who loses...
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Voss
Johann Ulrich Voss arrives in the young colony of New South Wales in 1845 with one goal, to be the first man to cross the Australian continent from...
What Shaped 1973
Farrell's novel of a British garrison under siege during the Indian rebellion of 1857 belongs to a decade in which British writers were finally examining the empire from the inside. Thomas Pynchon published Gravity's Rainbow in February 1973, the book that would cause the biggest prize controversy of the decade a year later. The Watergate hearings ran through the summer, Roe v. Wade was decided in January, the last American troops left Vietnam in March, and the oil embargo began in October.
Published in 1973, 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 selectionSula
Nel Wright and Sula Peace grow up together in the Bottom, a Black neighborhood on a hillside above the fictional Medallion, Ohio, settled...
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Curated selectionThe Princess Bride
Goldman frames the whole novel as his own abridgment of a much longer, allegedly forgotten satirical classic by a fictional author named S....