Fond Books
The Year in Prizes

1993 Book Award Winners

Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman ever to receive it. Robert Olen Butler took the Pulitzer for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Roddy Doyle won the Booker for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, and Louise Glück won the poetry Pulitzer for The Wild Iris.

18 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature

Winners

What Shaped 1993

Morrison's Nobel lecture is a parable about an old blind woman and a bird, and it argues that language is the measure of our lives and that oppressive language does more than represent violence. Butler's stories are narrated by Vietnamese immigrants in Louisiana, written by an American army intelligence officer who had learned the language during the war. Glück's The Wild Iris, spoken partly by flowers, began the ascent that would take her to a Nobel of her own.

Published in 1993, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1993 and took no major award.

  • No major prize
    The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

    Five sisters live on an ordinary street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan in the middle 1970s. Cecilia, the youngest, attempts suicide, and after she...

  • No major prize
    Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

    Set among heroin users in late 1980s Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, the novel follows Mark Renton and his circle, Sick Boy, Spud, the...

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