The year in prizes
1992 Book Award Winners
19 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, King Lear retold on an Iowa farm. Michael Ondaatje shared the Booker for The English Patient, Cormac McCarthy took the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses, and Derek Walcott received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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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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Sacred Hunger
In 1752 a Liverpool merchant called William Kemp sinks his money into a slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, and sends his nephew Matthew Paris...
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The English Patient
In a bombed villa north of Florence in 1945, four people are waiting for a war that has moved on. A Canadian nurse named Hana has stayed behind to...
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All the Pretty Horses
San Angelo, Texas, 1949. John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the family ranch, the only life he wants, is marked for sale by a...
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All the Pretty Horses
San Angelo, Texas, 1949. John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the family ranch, the only life he wants, is marked for sale by a...
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Mao II
Mao II opens at Yankee Stadium, where Karen Janney, twenty one, is married to a man she has only just met in a mass wedding of the Unification...
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The Prize
Daniel Yergin tells the history of the oil industry from its origins in the 1850s through 1990, treating petroleum less as a commodity than as a...
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The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
Mark Neely examines Abraham Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the wider record of civilians arrested under military authority...
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Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller Jr.
Fortunate Son is Lewis B. Puller Jr.'s own account of his life, and it opens under the shadow of his father, Lieutenant General Lewis "Chesty"...
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Becoming a Man
Becoming a Man is Paul Monette's memoir of the half life he lived before he came out, and it is one of the angriest and most liberating coming of...
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
Humans share around ninety eight percent of their genes with the two chimpanzee species, close enough, Diamond begins, that a taxonomist from...
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Selected Poems
Selected Poems draws from across James Tate's career up to 1991, gathering poems built around solitary, faintly bewildered characters trying to...
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Barrayar
Cordelia Naismith, a Betan survey captain, has married the enemy commander she captured, moved to his planet, and is pregnant. Barrayar is a...
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Doomsday Book
In a near future Oxford, history is a field discipline. Historians travel to the period they study, and Kivrin, a student, has spent years...
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Blood of the Lamb
Peter Carenza is a young Catholic priest with a gift he does not understand: touched by him, the sick recover, the dying sit up, and once, in an...
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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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A Dance at the Slaughterhouse
Matthew Scudder, unlicensed investigator, recovering alcoholic, keeper of his own strange tithes, is hired by a dead woman's brother: Amanda...
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Shiloh
Eleven year old Marty Preston finds a mistreated beagle in the hills near his home in Friendly, West Virginia, and quickly figures out the dog...
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Tuesday
On a Tuesday evening around eight o'clock, frogs across a wetland begin rising into the air on their lily pads and drift over a sleeping town. They...
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Omeros
Omeros is an epic poem, seven books and sixty four chapters long, written in a loose adaptation of Dante's three line stanza that Derek Walcott...
What Shaped 1992
Smiley's transposition of Lear onto a farm inheritance turns the daughters' story inside out and makes the father's claim on them unbearable, which is the kind of rereading that changes the original. McCarthy had been publishing for nearly thirty years to almost no readership when All the Pretty Horses made him famous at fifty eight. Los Angeles burned for six days in April after the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King.
Published in 1992, 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 selectionSnow Crash
Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and former pizza delivery driver for a mafia run franchise, moonlights as a freelance intelligence gatherer inside the...
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Curated selectionThe Secret History
Richard Papen, a scholarship student from a flat, unglamorous California town, transfers to the small, wealthy Hampden College in Vermont and talks...