The year in prizes
1986 Book Award Winners
17 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Larry McMurtry won the Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove. Orson Scott Card took the Hugo for Ender's Game and the Nebula for its sequel Speaker for the Dead, Barry Lopez won for Arctic Dreams, and Wole Soyinka became the first African writer to receive the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Lonesome Dove
Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call are former Texas Rangers running a livery stable in a dusty settlement on the Rio Grande. Gus talks, drinks and...
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The Old Devils
Alun and Rhiannon Weaver come home to south Wales after decades in London, where Alun has made a good living as a professional Welshman,...
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World's Fair
Edgar is a small boy in the Bronx of the 1930s, and the novel is his childhood told from inside: the apartment on Eastburn Avenue, the older...
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Kate Vaiden
Kate Vaiden is 57 in 1984, has just been told she has cervical cancer, and sits down to write out her life, a life that turned on the son she...
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The Old Forest and Other Stories
The Old Forest and Other Stories brings together fourteen pieces from across Peter Taylor's long career, thirteen stories and a short play, The...
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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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Move Your Shadow
Joseph Lelyveld first reported from South Africa for The New York Times in the mid 1960s, and the government that ran the country under apartheid...
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...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
Walter McDougall's political history of the space age, titled with a deliberate lower case ellipsis as...the Heavens and the Earth, follows the...
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Louise Bogan: A Portrait
Louise Bogan wrote a small body of tightly controlled lyric poems, reviewed poetry for The New Yorker for almost forty years, and in 1945 became...
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Arctic Dreams
Arctic Dreams is Barry Lopez's account of five years traveling the far north of Alaska and Canada, with field biologists, with Inuit hunters, and...
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The Flying Change
The Flying Change takes its title from a dressage maneuver, a horse changing its leading leg at a canter without breaking stride, and Henry Taylor...
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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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Speaker for the Dead
Three thousand years after Ender Wiggin destroyed an entire species, he is thirty five years old, kept young by relativistic travel, and works...
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Song of Kali
Song of Kali is a horror novel set in Calcutta in the summer of 1977. Robert Luczak, an American poet and editor, is sent by Harper's Magazine to...
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The Suspect
The novel opens with the murder, in plain view: George Wilcox, eighty years old, standing in a Sechelt living room having just beaten his friend...
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Sarah, Plain and Tall
On the American prairie sometime in the late nineteenth century, widowed farmer Jacob Witting is struggling to raise his two children, Anna and...
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The Polar Express
A boy who no longer quite believes in Santa Claus hears a mysterious train idling outside his house on Christmas Eve, and its conductor invites him...
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Death and the King's Horseman
In a Yoruba kingdom under British colonial rule during the Second World War, tradition requires that when a king dies, his Horseman must follow him...
What Shaped 1986
Card's back to back sweep, winning both major science fiction awards two years running for a novel and its sequel, has never been matched. Soyinka's Nobel was a landmark for African writing and went to a Nigerian playwright who had been imprisoned for nearly two years during the Biafran war. Lonesome Dove did something similar for the western, taking a form dismissed as pulp and winning the Pulitzer with it. The space shuttle Challenger broke apart in January and Chernobyl exploded in April.
Published in 1986, 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 selectionIt
In the town of Derry, Maine, seven childhood outsiders, the stuttering Bill Denbrough, the overweight Ben Hanscom, the asthmatic Eddie Kaspbrak,...
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Curated selectionThe Sportswriter
Frank Bascombe, a divorced, thirty eight year old sportswriter living in the fictional New Jersey suburb of Haddam, narrates a single Easter...