The year in prizes
1985 Book Award Winners
17 prize categories represented, and 1 notable book from our curated collection
Keri Hulme won the Booker for The Bone People and Don DeLillo took the National Book Award for White Noise. Orson Scott Card won the Nebula for Ender's Game, William Gibson took the Hugo for Neuromancer, and Alison Lurie won the Pulitzer for Foreign Affairs.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Foreign Affairs
Vinnie Miner is fifty four, unmarried, plain, and a professor of children's literature at Corinth University in upstate New York. She flies to...
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The Bone People
Kerewin Holmes lives alone in a stone tower she built with lottery money on the coast of the South Island. She is part Maori, a painter who can no...
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White Noise
Jack Gladney invented Hitler studies. At the College on the Hill he is its chairman and its brand, robed and dark glassed, minting prestige from...
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The Accidental Tourist
Macon Leary writes guidebooks for people who hate to travel. His series, The Accidental Tourist, with a traveling armchair for a logo, tells...
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The Barracks Thief
The Barracks Thief is a short novel, closer to a long story, about three young paratroopers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, waiting for orders to...
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The Good War
Studs Terkel built The Good War entirely out of other people's voices, gathering more than a hundred interviews with Americans, and some non...
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Prophets of Regulation
Thomas McCraw approaches the history of American economic regulation through four lives rather than a survey of policy: Charles Francis Adams, the...
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The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
Kenneth Silverman's biography follows Cotton Mather from a childhood so precocious that he entered Harvard College at eleven, the youngest student...
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Common Ground
Common Ground is the story of the Boston busing crisis told through three families, and it may be the most thorough act of listening in American...
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Yin
Yin gathers poems that range across mythology, feminist argument, and personal history, holding together a book that refuses to settle into any...
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Neuromancer
Case was a console cowboy, a thief who jacked his nervous system into the global data network and stole from corporations. He cheated the wrong...
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Ender's Game
Andrew Wiggin, called Ender, is six years old when the military takes him. Two alien invasions have nearly ended humanity, and the fleet believes...
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Bridge of Birds
Bridge of Birds is a comic quest novel set in a China of legend rather than of history, and it is narrated by a young man called Number Ten Ox, a...
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Mythago Wood
Steven Huxley comes home from the Second World War in 1946 to Oak Lodge, his family's house on the edge of Ryhope Wood in Herefordshire. The wood...
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Briarpatch
Benjamin Dill gets the call in Washington: his sister Felicity, a homicide detective in the unnamed Sunbelt city they grew up in, is dead, a bomb...
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The Hero and the Crown
Aerin is the daughter of King Arlbeth of Damar, pale and red haired in a court that expects its royal women to look like everyone else, and the...
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Saint George and the Dragon
Margaret Hodges retells a single episode from Edmund Spenser's sixteenth century epic The Faerie Queene: the Redcrosse Knight, guided by a princess...
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The Flanders Road
Captain de Reixach is shot from his horse and killed during the collapse of the French army in May 1940, and The Flanders Road circles that single...
What Shaped 1985
Hulme's novel, written over more than a decade and turned down by publisher after publisher before a small feminist collective in New Zealand printed it, is the least likely Booker winner there has been. DeLillo's White Noise, with its supermarket aisles, its airborne toxic event and its professor of Hitler studies, reads now like a documentary of the decade. Gorbachev came to power in March 1985 and began the reforms that ended the Soviet Union.
Published in 1985, 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 selectionBlood Meridian
An unnamed teenager known only as the kid drifts out of Tennessee into the Texas borderlands in the years after the Mexican American War, and after...