The year in prizes
1999 Book Award Winners
22 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
J. M. Coetzee won a second Booker Prize for Disgrace, becoming the first writer to win it twice. Michael Cunningham took the Pulitzer for The Hours, and the first Samuel Johnson Prize, now the Baillie Gifford, went to Antony Beevor for Stalingrad.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Hours
Three women, three cities, one day each, cut together. In Richmond in 1923 Virginia Woolf wakes with the first sentence of Mrs Dalloway, endures a...
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Disgrace
David Lurie is fifty two, twice divorced, and teaching communications at a Cape Town technical university where the Romantic poetry he cares about...
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Waiting
Every summer for many years, Lin Kong, an army doctor at a hospital in the Manchurian city of Muji, takes his leave, travels home to Goose Village,...
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A Crime in the Neighborhood
In the spring of 1972, in a leafy suburb of Washington DC, a young boy is molested and murdered behind the shopping mall, and the neighborhood's...
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Motherless Brooklyn
Lionel Essrog has Tourette's syndrome, and he narrates. Words come out of him doubled, rhymed, barked, and rearranged; he taps shoulders,...
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The Hours
Three women, three cities, one day each, cut together. In Richmond in 1923 Virginia Woolf wakes with the first sentence of Mrs Dalloway, endures a...
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Annals of the Former World
John McPhee spent close to twenty years driving Interstate 80 back and forth across the United States with a rotating cast of geologists, using the...
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Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 spent more than two decades in the making before Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace finished it, and the...
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Lindbergh
A. Scott Berg spent close to a decade on this biography after securing an extraordinary grant of access from Charles Lindbergh's widow, Anne Morrow...
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Embracing Defeat
Embracing Defeat is the history of Japan in the seven years after its surrender, 1945 to 1952, and it is that rarest of prize sweepers, a scholarly...
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Stalingrad
The German Sixth Army reached the Volga in the late summer of 1942 and was destroyed there over the following six months. Beevor tells that story...
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The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Paul Erdős owned almost nothing, traveling for decades out of a suitcase, with no house, no job and no family of his own. For most of the twentieth...
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Blizzard of One
Blizzard of One gathers poems built around stillness and absence, images of empty rooms, blank landscapes, and the particular quiet that settles...
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Billy's Rain
Billy's Rain is a book about an affair, told from inside its whole arc, the beginning, the hotel afternoons, the lies that logistics require, the...
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To Say Nothing of the Dog
Ned Henry is an Oxford historian in 2057, and he has time lag: too many jumps to the past in too few weeks, running errands for Lady Schrapnell, an...
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Parable of the Talents
The sequel to Parable of the Sower, and it should be read second. Lauren Olamina has built Acorn, a small self sufficient community in northern...
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Mr. X
Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan has a seizure and a vision: he rides along, paralyzed, inside a black coated figure who stalks and kills, a...
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The Antelope Wife
The Antelope Wife moves between the years after the Civil War, near the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, and Minneapolis in the late 1990s,...
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Mr. White's Confession
St Paul, Minnesota, winter 1939: a dime a dance girl named Ruby Fahey is found dead on a bluff, and the investigation belongs to Lieutenant Wesley...
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Holes
Stanley Yelnats is sent to Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention facility in a dried out Texas lakebed, after being wrongly convicted of stealing a...
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Snowflake Bentley
The book follows the real life of Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farmer who grew obsessed as a boy with the endless variety of snow crystals falling on...
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The Tin Drum
Oskar Matzerath narrates his own life from a bed in a West German mental institution in the early 1950s, working backward from 1924 in the Free...
What Shaped 1999
Disgrace, about a disgraced professor and his daughter on a farm in the new South Africa, was criticized by the governing party as a racist portrayal and is now widely considered the finest novel of the post apartheid period. Cunningham's The Hours braids Virginia Woolf's life into two later ones and won a Pulitzer for a book that is essentially a reading of Mrs Dalloway. Britain's major non fiction prize began that year with a history of a single siege.
Published in 1999, 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 selectionGirl with a Pearl Earring
Griet is sixteen when her father, a tile painter, is blinded in a kiln explosion and the family loses its income. She is sent to work as a maid in...
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Curated selectionThe Perks of Being a Wallflower
Charlie, an anxious, unusually perceptive ninth grader in a Pittsburgh suburb in the early 1990s, narrates his freshman year through a series of...