Fond Books

The year in prizes

1993 Book Award Winners

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

Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman ever to receive it. Robert Olen Butler took the Pulitzer for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Roddy Doyle won the Booker for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and Louise Glück won the poetry Pulitzer for The Wild Iris.

Winners

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

What Shaped 1993

Morrison's Nobel lecture is a parable about an old blind woman and a bird, and it argues that language is the measure of our lives and that oppressive language does more than represent violence. Butler's stories are narrated by Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana, written by an American army intelligence officer who had learned the language during the war. Glück's The Wild Iris, spoken partly by flowers, began the ascent that would take her to a Nobel of her own.

Published in 1993, 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
    The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

    Five sisters live on an ordinary street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the middle 1970s. Cecilia, the youngest, attempts suicide, and after she...

  • Curated selection
    Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

    Set among heroin users in late 1980s Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, the novel follows Mark Renton and his circle, Sick Boy, Spud, the...

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