The year in prizes
1982 Book Award Winners
17 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
John Updike won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich. Thomas Keneally won the Booker for Schindler's Ark, Sylvia Plath was awarded the poetry Pulitzer nearly twenty years after her death, and Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
-
Rabbit Is Rich
It is 1979 and Harry Angstrom has money for the first time in his life. He runs Springer Motors, his late father in law's Toyota dealership in...
-
Schindler's List
Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist, a member of the Nazi party, a heavy drinker and a serial adulterer who used forced Jewish labor in an...
-
Rabbit Is Rich
It is 1979 and Harry Angstrom has money for the first time in his life. He runs Springer Motors, his late father in law's Toyota dealership in...
-
George Mills
There has been a George Mills in every generation for a thousand years, and not one of them has got anywhere. The first sets out on the First...
-
The Chaneysville Incident
John Washington is a young Black historian teaching in Philadelphia when word comes that Old Jack Crawley is dying. Old Jack, a backwoods hermit...
-
The Soul of a New Machine
The Soul of a New Machine is the best book ever written about how computers actually get built, and it was written before most Americans had...
-
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
Mary Boykin Chesnut kept a diary from February 18, 1861, to June 26, 1865, moving with her husband, Senator turned Confederate general James...
-
Grant: A Biography
William S. McFeely's biography follows Ulysses S. Grant from a childhood in Ohio spent around his father's tannery, a trade Grant hated, through...
-
The Soul of a New Machine
The Soul of a New Machine is the best book ever written about how computers actually get built, and it was written before most Americans had...
-
The Collected Poems
The Collected Poems gathers everything Sylvia Plath wrote as an adult poet, arranged in the order Ted Hughes worked out from her manuscripts and...
-
Downbelow Station
Pell Station orbits the only habitable world on the long chain of stations humanity built outward from Earth. The Earth Company that financed the...
-
No Enemy But Time
John Monegal is born in Spain to a deaf mute Spanish prostitute, abandoned, and adopted by an American air force couple. From childhood he dreams...
-
Little, Big
Little, Big follows several generations of the Drinkwater family and the house they live in, Edgewood, somewhere north of New York City. The...
-
Peregrine
Above the Rockefeller Center skating rink, a peregrine falcon, the fastest animal alive, stoops from the sky at her falconer's signal and kills a...
-
A Visit to William Blake's Inn
Nancy Willard imagines an inn kept by the poet William Blake himself, where a child stays for a day and a half among an unruly cast of guests: a...
-
Jumanji
Siblings Judy and Peter find a dusty jungle themed board game abandoned in the park, and a printed warning on the box, that once a game of Jumanji...
-
One Hundred Years of Solitude
José Arcadio Buendía and his wife and cousin Úrsula Iguarán flee their hometown after José Arcadio kills a man in a duel, and a dream leads him to...
What Shaped 1982
Keneally's Booker caused a lasting argument because the book is closely reported fact presented as a novel, and judges had to decide what fiction is. Steven Spielberg filmed it a decade later as Schindler's List. García Márquez won for a body of work centered on One Hundred Years of Solitude and brought Latin American writing a global readership it has never lost. Plath's posthumous Pulitzer arrived for a Collected Poems assembled by the husband she had left.
Published in 1982, 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 selectionDifferent Seasons
King collects four novellas, each attached to a season, that step away from the ghosts and monsters of his earlier books toward more grounded,...
-
Curated selectionThe House of the Spirits
Allende follows the Trueba family across four generations in an unnamed South American country closely modeled on her native Chile. Clara del...