Fond Books

The year in prizes

1981 Book Award Winners

17 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection

John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer for A Confederacy of Dunces, eleven years after his death. Salman Rushdie won the Booker for Midnight's Children, and Elias Canetti received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Winners

In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.

What Shaped 1981

Toole killed himself in 1969 after failing to place his novel, and his mother spent the following decade pressing the manuscript on anyone who would read it until the novelist Walker Percy finally did. The Pulitzer went to a book that had been rejected everywhere. Rushdie's Midnight's Children, tying a boy's life to India's independence, was later voted the best of all Booker winners twice over, and it made a generation of postcolonial novelists possible. The first cases of what became AIDS were reported in June.

Published in 1981, 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.

  • Curated selection
    Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

    Will Graham, a former FBI profiler whose gift for entering a killer's mind cost him his nerve and nearly his life when he caught the psychiatrist...

  • Curated selection
    The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving

    Win Berry, a genial dreamer who never stops chasing an idea despite ordinary evidence against it, drags his wife Mary and their five children from...

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