The year in prizes
2012 Book Award Winners
21 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
For the first time since 1977 the Pulitzer board named no novel at all. The jury sent up three finalists and the board chose none of them, to widespread anger in publishing. Hilary Mantel won a second Booker for Bring Up the Bodies, Louise Erdrich took the National Book Award for The Round House, and Mo Yan received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Bring Up the Bodies
Anne Boleyn has failed to produce a son, Henry has noticed Jane Seymour, and Thomas Cromwell is asked to solve a problem that has no legal...
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The Round House
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, Geraldine Coutts is attacked and raped near the round house, the...
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The Song of Achilles
Patroclus tells it. An awkward, unpromising prince, he is exiled as a boy to Phthia after killing another child in a stupid accident, and there he...
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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day at Texas Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys are playing and the eight...
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The Buddha in the Attic
The Buddha in the Attic follows a generation of young Japanese women who cross the Pacific early in the twentieth century as picture brides, bound...
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The Swerve
In the winter of 1417, an unemployed papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini rode into a German monastery hunting old manuscripts and found a copy...
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Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Manning Marable spent years researching Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, drawing on archives and interviews to build a fuller account of a man he...
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George F. Kennan: An American Life
John Lewis Gaddis follows George Kennan from a Milwaukee childhood into a Foreign Service career that placed him inside almost every hinge point of...
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of life in Annawadi, a half acre slum wedged between the luxury hotels and the...
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Into the Silence
The question every Everest book asks is whether Mallory reached the summit before the mountain killed him in 1924. Davis's book, a decade in the...
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The Information
Gleick's subject is the concept underneath every other subject: information itself, the history of how humanity learned to store it, move it,...
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Life on Mars
Life on Mars uses the imagery of deep space, science fiction, and David Bowie to elegize Tracy K. Smith's father, an engineer who worked on the...
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Stag's Leap
Stag's Leap is the book Sharon Olds wrote when her husband of thirty years left her for another woman, and it may be the most complete anatomy of a...
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Among Others
Morwenna Phelps is fifteen, Welsh, walks with a stick, and has been sent to an English boarding school she loathes, having run from a mother who...
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2312
Three centuries from now the solar system is settled and humanity is doing well everywhere except the place it came from. Mercury has a city called...
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The Drowning Girl
India Morgan Phelps, Imp to everyone, is a painter in Providence with a job, a girlfriend, a diagnosis, schizophrenia, the family inheritance, her...
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Osama
Joe is a private detective in Vientiane, Laos, with no surname, no visible past and, it seems, no life outside his work. A mysterious woman walks...
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Gone
The carjacking looks routine, as Bristol crime goes: a Vauxhall taken at a service station, the driver a young mother left screaming in the...
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Dead End in Norvelt
Jack Gantos casts a fictionalized version of himself as a boy grounded for an entire summer in 1962 after he fires his father's souvenir Japanese...
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A Ball for Daisy
Daisy, a small white dog, loves her red ball more than anything else in her world, carrying it everywhere and clearly treating it as her closest...
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Red Sorghum
A grandson narrates his own family's history in rural Shandong, reconstructing what his grandparents did and endured between 1923 and 1976 from...
What Shaped 2012
The Pulitzer board's refusal cost the three finalists the sales a win brings and produced a rare public revolt, with the jury chair writing publicly about how the decision was made. Mantel became the first British writer and the first woman to win the Booker twice, and the first to win for a direct sequel. Erdrich's The Round House, about a Native teenager seeking justice after his mother is attacked on a reservation where jurisdiction is contested, won the National Book Award.
Published in 2012, 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 selectionGone Girl
On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne comes home to find his wife Amy missing from their house in North Carthage, Missouri,...
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Curated selectionNW
NW follows four Londoners who grew up together on the Caldwell council estate in the northwest of the city and have since scattered into very...