1983 Book Award Winners
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for The Color Purple, becoming the first Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer. J. M. Coetzee won the Booker for Life & Times of Michael K, and William Golding received the Nobel.
14 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Color Purple
Celie is fourteen, poor, Black and in rural Georgia, and the man she believes is her father has told her not to tell anybody but God what he has...
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Life & Times of Michael K
Michael K is a municipal gardener in Cape Town, born with a cleft lip, raised in an institution, and treated all his life as though he is simple....
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The Color Purple
Celie is fourteen, poor, Black and in rural Georgia, and the man she believes is her father has told her not to tell anybody but God what he has...
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Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Susan Sheehan spent years following a young Queens woman she named Sylvia Frumkin through the mental health system, and the book she built from...
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The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
Rhys Isaac traces Virginia's society across fifty pivotal years, from the settled hierarchy of the tobacco gentry around 1740 to the transformed...
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Growing Up
Growing Up is Russell Baker's own account of his childhood, told from a hardscrabble upbringing in rural Virginia during the Depression, his...
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China: Alive in the Bitter Sea
When Washington and Beijing normalized relations in 1979, Fox Butterfield opened the New York Times bureau in China, the paper's first since the...
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Selected Poems
Selected Poems draws together work from across Galway Kinnell's career up to the early 1980s, pulling pieces from earlier books including Body Rags...
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Foundation's Edge
Five hundred years into the Seldon Plan, the Foundation is winning exactly as predicted, and that is what worries Golan Trevize. The predictions...
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Startide Rising
The Streaker is the first starship crewed mostly by uplifted dolphins, with seven humans and one chimpanzee aboard, and it has found something in a...
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Billingsgate Shoal
Charles Adams, Doc to everyone, is a Boston area oral surgeon with a good practice, a good marriage, a sailboat, and the peculiar restlessness of a...
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Dicey's Song
Dicey Tillerman has already led her three younger siblings across two states to find their grandmother in Voigt's earlier novel Homecoming, and...
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Shadow
Marcia Brown translated Shadow from "La Feticheuse," a poem by the French writer Blaise Cendrars evoking African storytelling traditions built...
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Lord of the Flies
A group of British schoolboys, evacuated by plane during a war and left stranded after the aircraft crashes, wash up on an uninhabited island with...
What Shaped 1983
The Color Purple, told in letters by a poor Black woman in rural Georgia, became one of the most widely read and most frequently banned American novels of the century, and Spielberg's film followed two years later. Coetzee's novel of a man trying to stay outside a civil war was the first of his two Bookers and came out of a South Africa where the censors were still working. The AIDS epidemic was accelerating and largely unacknowledged by the American government.
Published in 1983, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1983 and took no major award.
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No major prizePet Sematary
Louis Creed moves his wife Rachel and their two young children, Ellie and Gage, from Chicago to rural Maine for a new job as a university doctor,...
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No major prizeThe Colour of Magic
Rincewind, a wizard who knows exactly one spell and cannot cast even that one safely, is hired to guide Twoflower, a cheerfully naive tourist from...