A number of writers and journalists have been honoured with 2020 Pulitzer Prize wins during a video livestream from the home of Dana Canedy, the prize administrator.
Established on behalf of Hungarian-American journalist and newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in 1917, the Pulitzer Prizes celebrate excellence in journalism, books, music and drama. Previous winners include authors such as Elizabeth Strout, Donna Tartt, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, who won the fiction prize in 2017 for The Underground Railroad and is this year’s fiction winner again.
Scroll down to see the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners in books!
Fiction
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys is Colson Whitehead’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning bestseller The Underground Railroad, in which he dramatises another strand of United States history, this time through the story of two boys, Elwood and Turner, sentenced to a stretch in a hellish reform school in Jim-Crow-era Florida. The tension between Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s scepticism leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.
Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped and destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative by a great American novelist whose work is essential to understanding the current reality of the United States.
Buy it here
Finalists: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett; The Topeka School by Ben Lerner.
Non-Fiction
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin
Ever since the nation’s inception, the idea of an open and ever-expanding frontier has been central to American identity. Symbolising a future of endless promise, it was the foundation of the United States’ belief in itself as an exceptional nation–democratic, individualistic, forward-looking. Today, though, America has a new symbol: the border wall.
In The End of the Myth, acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history–from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion–fighting wars and opening markets–served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly. And now, the combined catastrophe of the 2008 financial meltdown and our unwinnable wars in the Middle East have slammed this gate shut, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home.
It is this new reality, Grandin says, that explains the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, the extreme anger and polarisation that catapulted Trump to the presidency. The border wall may or may not be built, but it will survive as a rallying point, an allegorical tombstone marking the end of American exceptionalism.
Buy it here
The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness by Anne Boyer
A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ‘dolorists’, the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ‘pink ribbon culture’ while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.
Genre-bending, angry, profoundly humane and deeply affecting, The Undying is an unmissably original book of heart, intellect and fierce insight into the sicknesses and, occasionally, the perverse glories of our contemporary world.
Buy it here
Finalists: Elderhood by Louise Aronson; Solitary by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George
History
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel
Born into slavery, Henrietta Wood was taken to Cincinnati and legally freed in 1848. In 1853, a Kentucky deputy sheriff named Zebulon Ward colluded with Wood’s employer, abducted her, and sold her back into bondage. She remained enslaved throughout the Civil War, giving birth to a son in Mississippi and never forgetting who had put her in this position.
By 1869, Wood had obtained her freedom for a second time and returned to Cincinnati, where she sued Ward for damages in 1870. Astonishingly, after eight years of litigation, Wood won her case: in 1878, a Federal jury awarded her $2,500. The decision stuck on appeal. More important than the amount, though the largest ever awarded by an American court in restitution for slavery, was the fact that any money was awarded at all.
McDaniel’s book is an epic tale of a black woman who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors.
Buy it here
Finalists: Race for Profit by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin
Biography
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser
Susan Sontag was our last great literary star. Her brilliant, serious mind combined with her striking image, her rigorous intellectualism and her groundbreaking inquiries into what was then seen as ‘low culture’ – celebrity, photographs, camp – propelled her into her own unique, inimitable category and made her famous the world over, emblematic of twentieth-century New York literary glamour.
Sontag is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted personal archives and on hundreds of interviews conducted with many people around the world who spoke freely for the first time about Susan Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait of an endlessly complex, dazzling woman; one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, who lived one of its most fascinating lives.
Buy it here
Finalists: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer; Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, And Me by Deirdre Bair
Poetry
The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s daring new book The Tradition details the normalisation of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown’s mastery, and his invention of the duplex–a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues–is testament to his formal skill. The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.
Buy it here
Finalists: Dunce by Mary Ruefle; Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems by Dorianne Laux
Congratulations to all of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners!
Find out more about the 2020 Putlizer Prizes here.
About the Contributor
Olivia Fricot
Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.
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