The leaves are turning, the weather is getting colder and we’re heading into prime season for curling up under a blanket with a good book. If you haven’t already, why not add some of the most recent Pulitzer Prize winners to your TBR list. (And, for a complete list of Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, please visit our bookshop.)
2020 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
A spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2019 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Overstory, Richard Powers
An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2018 Pulitzer Prize winner: Less, Andrew Sean Greer
A generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2017 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2016 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a “man of two minds” — and two countries, Vietnam and the United States. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2015 Pulitzer Prize winner: All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2014 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
A beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2013 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson
An exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2011 Pulitzer Prize winner: A Visit from the Good Squad, Jennifer Egan
An inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2010 Pulitzer Prize winner: Tinkers, Paul Harding
A powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2009 Pulitzer Prize winner: Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
A collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine that packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating. — citation from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
2008 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Encapsulating Dominican-American history, this story opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere–and risk it all–in the name of love. (from book description)
2007 Pulitzer Prize winner: The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The profoundly moving story of a journey, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which a father and his son are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of. (from book description)