The year in prizes
1991 Book Award Winners
19 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
John Updike won a second Pulitzer for Rabbit at Rest, closing the four novel sequence he had begun in 1960. Ben Okri won the Booker for The Famished Road, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich took the history prize for A Midwife's Tale, and Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Rabbit at Rest
Harry Angstrom is fifty five and spends half the year in a Florida condominium, eating salted nuts he has been told to avoid, watching his heart...
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The Famished Road
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child, one of those born repeatedly to the same mother and dying young to return to the companions who are calling him...
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Mating
The narrator, never named, is a thirty two year old American anthropology graduate student in Botswana whose doctoral thesis has just quietly died,...
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A Thousand Acres
Larry Cook owns a thousand acres of the best land in Zebulon County, Iowa, assembled over three generations by draining the wetland underneath it....
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Philadelphia Fire
In May 1985 Philadelphia police dropped explosives onto the roof of a West Philadelphia house occupied by MOVE, an Afrocentric organization, and...
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The Ants
Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson set out to gather essentially everything science had learned about ants into a single volume, and the result...
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A Midwife's Tale
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich builds A Midwife's Tale around a single source, the diary Martha Ballard, a midwife and healer in Hallowell, Maine, kept for...
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Jackson Pollock: An American Saga
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's biography follows Jackson Pollock from his 1912 birth in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five brothers,...
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Freedom (Vol. 1)
Patterson sets out to explain where the Western idea of personal freedom came from, and arrives at an answer most readers find counterintuitive on...
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Wonderful Life
In a drawer of fossils from a quarry in the Canadian Rockies, Gould found what he argued was the most important lesson in the history of life. The...
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Near Changes
Near Changes gathers poems written from deep inside a long marriage, Mona Van Duyn's own marriage to the critic Jarvis Thurston, by then in its...
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The Vor Game
Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Imperial Military Academy near the bottom of nothing, since he is four foot nine with brittle bones in a...
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Stations of the Tide
The planet Miranda has a fifty year cycle. For most of it the continent is dry and habited, and then the Jubilee Tides come, the ocean rises...
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Boy's Life
Zephyr, Alabama, 1964: twelve year old Cory Mackenson is riding the milk route with his father before dawn when a car runs off the road into...
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Only Begotten Daughter
Only Begotten Daughter is a satire about the second coming, except that the Messiah is a girl from New Jersey. Murray Jacob Katz is a celibate...
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Thomas the Rhymer
Thomas the Rhymer is Ellen Kushner's novel of the old Scottish ballad about a thirteenth century minstrel carried off by the Queen of Elfland. Her...
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New Orleans Mourning
Mardi Gras, and the King of Carnival is on his float in white tie and rhinestone crown when someone dressed as Dolly Parton shoots him from a...
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Maniac Magee
Jeffrey Lionel Magee, orphaned and drifting after his parents' deaths, arrives in the fictional town of Two Mills, split hard along racial lines...
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Black and White
Black and White splits every spread into four quadrants and runs four stories at once: in "Seeing Things," a boy travels alone overnight by train...
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July's People
Nadine Gordimer imagines a near future in which South Africa's Black population has risen violently against apartheid, and follows one white...
What Shaped 1991
Okri was thirty two and his novel, narrated by a spirit child in an unnamed African country, was unlike anything the Booker had honored. Gordimer's Nobel came to a white South African novelist who had spent her career writing against apartheid while the system was finally being dismantled. Ulrich built a prize winning history out of the diary of an ordinary Maine midwife that other historians had dismissed as trivial. The Gulf War was fought in January and the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December.
Published in 1991, 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 selectionAmerican Psycho
Patrick Bateman, a Harvard educated Wall Street trader in his mid twenties, narrates his life among nearly identical yuppie friends who constantly...
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Curated selectionOutlander
Claire Randall, a former combat nurse on a 1945 honeymoon in Inverness with her husband Frank, touches a standing stone at the Craigh na Dun circle...