Fond Books

The year in prizes

1983 Book Award Winners

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

Alice Walker won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for The Color Purple, becoming the first Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer. J. M. Coetzee won the Booker for Life & Times of Michael K, and William Golding received the Nobel.

Winners

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

What Shaped 1983

The Color Purple, told in letters by a poor Black woman in rural Georgia, became one of the most widely read and most frequently banned American novels of the century, and Spielberg's film followed two years later. Coetzee's novel of a man trying to stay outside a civil war was the first of his two Bookers and came out of a South Africa where the censors were still working. The AIDS epidemic was accelerating and largely unacknowledged by the American government.

Published in 1983, 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
    Pet Sematary by Stephen King

    Louis Creed moves his wife Rachel and their two young children, Ellie and Gage, from Chicago to rural Maine for a new job as a university doctor,...

  • Curated selection
    The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

    Rincewind, a wizard who knows exactly one spell and cannot cast even that one safely, is hired to guide Twoflower, a cheerfully naive tourist from...

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