1994 Book Award Winners
Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, having taken the National Book Award for it the previous year. James Kelman won the Booker for How Late It Was, How Late, Lois Lowry won the Newbery for The Giver, and Kenzaburo Oe received the Nobel.
16 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Shipping News
Quoyle is a large, damp, unhappy man who fails at newspapers in upstate New York and is married to Petal Bear, who despises him and does not...
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How Late It Was, How Late
Sammy Samuels wakes up in a Glasgow lane after a two day drinking session, gets into an argument with some plain clothes police, takes a beating,...
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A Frolic of His Own
Oscar Crease, middle aged instructor of American history and grandson of a Supreme Court justice, has been run over by his own car, a Japanese...
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Lenin's Tomb
David Remnick arrived in Moscow as The Washington Post's correspondent in 1988, near the start of the changes Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of...
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W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
David Levering Lewis's biography, the first of two volumes, follows W. E. B. Du Bois from his 1868 birth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in a...
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How We Die
How We Die is exactly what its title promises, a surgeon's chapter by chapter account of what actually happens to the body in the ways most of us...
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The Language of the Genes
Jones's governing conceit does real work: genetics is a language, DNA a text copied and miscopied down generations, and the genome therefore a...
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Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
Neon Vernacular combines new poems with a wide selection from Yusef Komunyakaa's earlier books, moving between three bodies of material that recur...
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The Annals of Chile
The Annals of Chile carries two of the great elegies of late twentieth century poetry, and they are elegies only Paul Muldoon could have written,...
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Green Mars
Fifty years after the failed revolution that closed Red Mars, the survivors of the First Hundred are hiding in a polar refuge under assumed names...
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Moving Mars
Casseia Majumdar is a student at the University of Mars, Sinai, when she joins a protest and gets herself thrown out along with several thousand...
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Dead in the Water
The freighter Morris leaves Long Beach carrying boxcars, a small crew, and a handful of passengers who could not or would not fly: a doctor and his...
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The Sculptress
Olive Martin dismembered her mother and sister in the family kitchen, arranged the pieces, and confessed: that is the record and the press named...
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The Giver
Twelve year old Jonas lives in a tightly controlled community that has organized itself around Sameness, a system that eliminated pain, conflict,...
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Grandfather's Journey
Allen Say tells his own grandfather's story: a young man leaves Japan during the Meiji era to cross the Pacific and see America, and falls in love...
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A Personal Matter
Bird, a twenty seven year old Japanese man who spends much of his time fantasizing about a walking tour of Africa he will probably never take,...
What Shaped 1994
Kelman's Booker, for a novel written entirely in the Glaswegian voice of a blind ex convict, caused one judge to call it a disgrace and threaten to resign, and Kelman replied that his culture had as much right to exist as anyone's. Lowry's The Giver became one of the most challenged books in American schools and one of the most read. Between April and July around eight hundred thousand people were killed in Rwanda while the world watched and did nothing.
Published in 1994, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1994 and took no major award.
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No major prizeInsomnia
Ralph Roberts, a retired widower in King's fictional Derry, Maine, develops severe insomnia that gradually opens his perception onto auras around...
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No major prizeThe Alienist
In 1896 New York, crime reporter John Schuyler Moore, alienist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, using the period term for a psychiatrist, and police...