The year in prizes
2006 Book Award Winners
22 prize categories represented, and 1 notable book from our curated collection
Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer for March, and Kiran Desai won the Booker for The Inheritance of Loss. Zadie Smith won the Women's Prize for On Beauty, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin took the biography Pulitzer for American Prometheus, and Orhan Pamuk received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
-
March
In Little Women the father is away at the war and barely present. Brooks gives him the book. John March is a chaplain with the Union army, an...
-
The Inheritance of Loss
A decaying house called Cho Oyu sits below Kanchenjunga near Kalimpong, in the Indian Himalaya. In it live a retired judge who despises almost...
-
The Echo Maker
On a winter night on a straight Nebraska road, Mark Schluter's truck leaves the pavement and rolls. He survives the coma with his memory apparently...
-
On Beauty
The Belseys of Wellington, a college town outside Boston, are a mixed family in every sense: Howard, a white English art historian who has built a...
-
The Inheritance of Loss
A decaying house called Cho Oyu sits below Kanchenjunga near Kalimpong, in the Indian Himalaya. In it live a retired judge who despises almost...
-
The March
Late in 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman took sixty thousand Union troops out of Atlanta and marched them to Savannah and then north through the...
-
Imperial Reckoning
Between 1952 and 1960 the British authorities in Kenya responded to the Mau Mau uprising by detaining an enormous number of Kikuyu civilians....
-
Polio: An American Story
David Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story follows the disease that terrified mid century American parents every summer, when swimming pools closed...
-
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin spent a combined twenty five years researching the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, following him from a wealthy New...
-
The Worst Hard Time
The Worst Hard Time is the story of the Dust Bowl told by the people who stayed, and it restored to American memory a catastrophe the Joads had...
-
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
Shapiro's wager is that the way into the most documented blank in literature, Shakespeare the man, is not the cradle to grave biography, which must...
-
Electric Universe
Bodanis tells the history of electricity as a chain of possessed individuals, each seized by a force nobody could see, and the storytelling voltage...
-
Late Wife
Late Wife traces the end of Claudia Emerson's first marriage and the cautious beginning of a second, one shadowed throughout by the memory of her...
-
District and Circle
District and Circle is late Heaney at full strength, the book in which the Nobel laureate, past sixty five, returned to the deep ground of his art...
-
Spin
Three children are in a field one October night when the stars go out. A barrier has been placed around the Earth, and behind it time now runs at a...
-
Seeker
Ten thousand years from now, Alex Benedict deals in antiquities. He and his pilot Chase Kolpath find the objects that survive from earlier periods...
-
Lisey's Story
Two years after the death of Scott Landon, celebrated novelist, his widow Lisey finally starts clearing his study, an act every widow in King's...
-
Kafka on the Shore
Kafka on the Shore tells two stories in alternating chapters until they meet. In one, a fifteen year old boy runs away from his father's house in...
-
Citizen Vince
Vince Camden makes donuts in Spokane before dawn, deals a little stolen credit card business on the side, plays cards with the town's small...
-
Criss Cross
Debbie and her friends Hector, Lenny, Patty, and the newly arrived Phil drift through a single summer in the small town of Seldom sometime in the...
-
The Hello, Goodbye Window
A young girl narrates a visit to her grandparents' house, and the kitchen window at its center becomes the whole world of the story: she and her...
-
My Name Is Red
In Istanbul in 1591, a miniaturist working in secret on an illustrated book commissioned by the Ottoman sultan is murdered and thrown down a well,...
What Shaped 2006
American Prometheus spent twenty five years in the making and became the definitive life of Robert Oppenheimer, reaching a far wider audience again when Christopher Nolan filmed it seventeen years later. Pamuk's Nobel went to a Turkish novelist who had been prosecuted in his own country months earlier for speaking about the Armenian genocide. Desai, at thirty five, was the youngest woman to have won the Booker.
Published in 2006, 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 selectionThe Blind Side
Michael Lewis braids two stories that turn out to be one argument about how markets learn to value what they need. The first traces how...