The year in prizes
2000 Book Award Winners
22 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies, a debut story collection. Margaret Atwood won the Booker for The Blind Assassin, and Gao Xingjian became the first writer in Chinese to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Interpreter of Maladies
Nine stories about Indian and Indian American lives, most of them turning on something that does not get said. In the title story a tour guide...
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The Blind Assassin
Iris Chase Griffen is eighty two, poor, and living alone in the Ontario town her family's button factory once ran. She is writing an account of her...
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In America
In 1876 a celebrated Polish actress walks away from everything: the Warsaw stage where she reigns, the partitioned country that has made her a...
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When I Lived in Modern Times
In April 1946 Evelyn Sert, twenty years old, a hairdresser from Soho, stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. Her mother is dead, the man...
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Being Dead
Joseph and Celice are zoologists, married for nearly thirty years, and on the first page they are already dead. They have driven out to Baritone...
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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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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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Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War
David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear covers the sixteen years, 1929 to 1945, that took the United States from the Wall Street crash into the ashes...
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Vera, Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov
Stacy Schiff follows Vera Slonim from a prosperous Jewish family in prerevolutionary Saint Petersburg through the exile that scattered her...
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In the Heart of the Sea
In 1820, in the remotest stretch of the Pacific, an enraged sperm whale twice rammed and sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex, and the twenty men who...
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Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness
The second half of David Cairns's life of Hector Berlioz picks the composer up in 1832, back in Paris with the Symphonie fantastique behind him and...
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The Elegant Universe
Physics enters the twenty first century with an embarrassment at its center: its two great theories, general relativity for the large and quantum...
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Repair
Repair gathers poems that work through guilt, memory, and the ethics of simply witnessing another person's suffering, built out of C. K. Williams's...
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The Weather in Japan
Michael Longley is the great master of the short poem in modern Irish literature, and The Weather in Japan is his art at its most concentrated: a...
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A Deepness in the Sky
Two human fleets arrive at the same dead star at the same time. The Qeng Ho are traders, a culture of merchant families who cross between stars at...
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Darwin's Radio
A retrovirus that has been sitting dormant in human DNA for millions of years switches on. Public health calls it Herod's flu, because what it does...
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The Traveling Vampire Show
Grandville, 1963, one August day, sunrise to midnight. Posters have appeared overnight: for one night only, at Janks Field outside town, the...
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Thraxas
Thraxas is a private investigator in Turai, a city state of middling influence and power, and he is not much to look at. He once worked at the...
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Bones
Nick Parrish is the worst thing the state of California has in custody, a serial killer of women who has never given up his count, and the deal his...
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Bud, Not Buddy
Ten year old Bud Caldwell is an orphan bouncing through Michigan foster homes during the depths of the Great Depression, and after a bad placement...
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Joseph Had a Little Overcoat
Joseph, a Jewish farmer, owns an overcoat that grows old and worn, and rather than throw it away he keeps cutting it down into something smaller...
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Soul Mountain
A writer in Beijing is told he has lung cancer, then told just as abruptly that the diagnosis was a mistake, and the reprieve sends him not back to...
What Shaped 2000
Lahiri was thirty two and a story collection almost never wins the fiction Pulitzer, so her win was doubly unusual, and her subject, Indian families divided between Calcutta and New England, arrived at exactly the moment American publishing began looking for it. Atwood's Booker came for a novel with a science fiction novel folded inside it. Gao's Nobel was condemned by the Chinese government, which had banned his work and driven him to France a decade earlier.
Published in 2000, 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 selectionHouse of Leaves
The novel presents itself as a manuscript by Zampano, a blind, recently dead scholar, discovered and edited for publication by Johnny Truant, a...
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Curated selectionThe Amber Spyglass
The third volume of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy scatters its characters across worlds that Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry are trying...