The year in prizes
2019 Book Award Winners
22 prize categories represented, and 1 notable book from our curated collection
The Booker Prize was split between Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for The Testaments, against the rules. Richard Powers won the Pulitzer for The Overstory, Susan Choi took the National Book Award for Trust Exercise, and Peter Handke received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Overstory
Nine people, in nine separate stories, are brought by different routes to the same conclusion: that trees are the important thing and that we are...
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Girl, Woman, Other
Twelve people, mostly Black British women, mostly connected to each other in ways the reader works out gradually. A playwright whose first National...
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The Testaments
Fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead is rotting from the inside. Three voices tell how it comes apart: Aunt Lydia, writing...
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Trust Exercise
In a hothouse performing arts high school in a sprawling Sun Belt city in the early 1980s, two freshmen, Sarah and David, fall into first love,...
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An American Marriage
Celestial and Roy are eighteen months into a good marriage, young, Black, educated and rising in Atlanta, he in sales and she as an artist whose...
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Everything Inside
Everything Inside is eight stories about Haitians and their children in Miami, New York and Haiti itself, published by Knopf in August 2019. In...
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Call Me Zebra
Bibi Abbas Abbas Hosseini is the last of a proud family line of self described "Autodidacts, Anarchists, Atheists." Her family fled Iran during the...
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Amity and Prosperity
Eliza Griswold follows Stacey Haney and her family through the years after a natural gas drilling and fracking operation arrived near their home in...
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Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
David W. Blight's Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom follows its subject from his birth into slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore through his...
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The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Jeffrey Stewart follows Alain Locke from a Philadelphia childhood into a string of firsts that still define him, the first African American named a...
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The Yellow House
The Yellow House is a memoir with a building at its center: the shotgun house in New Orleans East that Sarah M. Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, bought...
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The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate and Mary Jane were murdered in Whitechapel in the autumn of 1888, and within weeks they had been reduced to a single...
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Invisible Women
Criado Perez's book is organized around one concept that sounds small and is not: the gender data gap. The world runs on data, and the data,...
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Be With
Be with was written after the death of Forrest Gander's wife, the poet C. D. Wright, in 2016, and it moves through grief by way of geology,...
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A Portable Paradise
A Portable Paradise puts Grenfell at its heart. The tower fire of 2017 is among the collection's central subjects, treated with documentary force,...
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The Calculating Stars
On a cold morning in March 1952 a meteorite hits the water off the coast of Maryland and destroys Washington and most of the eastern seaboard. Elma...
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A Song for a New Day
Luce Cannon is playing a show when the news comes through that a bomb has gone off in a stadium somewhere, and by the end of her set the venue is...
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Coyote Rage
In Galun'lati, the spirit world of Cherokee tradition, the Great Council of animals still meets, and mankind holds a seat that the animals long...
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Witchmark
Witchmark is set in Aeland, a country modeled on Edwardian England that is recovering from a war with its neighbor Laneer, a war much like the...
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Down the River Unto the Sea
Joe King Oliver was a first grade NYPD detective until the machine he served processed him: framed with an assault charge, a cell phone video...
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Merci Suárez Changes Gears
Merci Suárez is a scholarship student at Seaward Pines Academy, a private school where she and her older brother Roli stand out among wealthier...
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Hello Lighthouse
A lighthouse keeper takes up his post on a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland and records his years there the way keepers actually did,...
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The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Joseph Bloch is a former professional goalkeeper working an ordinary construction job when, in the novel's opening pages, he is dismissed,...
What Shaped 2019
The judges refused to choose and the administrators eventually allowed a tie, which made Evaristo the first Black woman to win the Booker and immediately complicated the achievement by sharing it. Powers's The Overstory tells nine human stories that turn out to be about trees and did more than any recent novel to make ecology a literary subject. Handke's Nobel drew protests over his support for Slobodan Milošević, and two Academy committee members resigned.
Published in 2019, 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 selectionThe Silent Patient
Alicia Berenson, a painter, shoots her husband Gabriel five times and has not spoken a single word since, a silence that has held for six years by...