1996 Book Award Winners
The Women's Prize for Fiction was awarded for the first time, going to Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter. Richard Ford won the Pulitzer for Independence Day, Graham Swift won the Booker for Last Orders, and Wisława Szymborska received the Nobel.
18 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Independence Day
Frank Bascombe used to write about sports. Now he sells houses in Haddam, New Jersey, and it is the Fourth of July weekend, 1988. He is divorced,...
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Last Orders
Four men meet in a Bermondsey pub on an April morning in 1990 and drive to Margate with a plastic jar. Jack Dodds, butcher, has died, and his last...
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Ship Fever and Other Stories
Seven stories and a novella, all of them about science as a human passion, worked variously across two centuries: Linnaeus in old age, his memory...
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A Spell of Winter
Catherine and Rob grow up nearly alone in their grandfather's decaying rural English house in the years before the First World War. Their mother...
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The Haunted Land
When communism fell in 1989, the new democracies of Central Europe inherited a question no revolution escapes: what do you do with the people who...
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William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
Alan Taylor reconstructs the founding and early decades of Cooperstown, New York, through the life of William Cooper, the land speculator and judge...
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God: A Biography
Jack Miles, a former Jesuit seminarian with a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard, reads the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and...
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An American Requiem
An American Requiem is James Carroll's memoir of his father, of his church, and of the war that broke both relationships, and it compresses the...
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Plague's Progress
Karlen's history proposes a simple, unsettling frame: infectious disease is not an interruption of the human story but a running commentary on it,...
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The Dream of the Unified Field
The Dream of the Unified Field selects poems from four of Jorie Graham's collections published between 1974 and 1994, tracing a poet steadily...
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Subhuman Redneck Poems
Subhuman Redneck Poems is Les Murray's angriest and most celebrated collection, sixty six poems that take their title from the sneer he imagined...
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The Diamond Age
Nation states have dissolved. People belong instead to phyles, tribes of shared culture and contract, and the wealthiest is New Atlantis, whose...
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Slow River
Lore van Oesterling wakes naked in an alley in a northern English city with the wounds from a bad kidnapping and no identity she is prepared to...
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The Green Mile
Cold Mountain Penitentiary in 1932. Paul Edgecombe runs E Block, death row, called the Green Mile for the lime colored linoleum between the cells...
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Come to Grief
Sid Halley has taken on aristocrats, syndicates and torturers, and this book hands him the case that costs the most: the evidence, assembled...
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The Midwife's Apprentice
A homeless, nameless girl sleeping in a dung heap for warmth is taken in by Jane Sharp, the local midwife in an unnamed medieval English village,...
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Officer Buckle and Gloria
Officer Buckle gives school safety talks so dull they put every student to sleep, until the police department pairs him with a dog named Gloria,...
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View with a Grain of Sand
View with a Grain of Sand is not a single collection Wisława Szymborska herself assembled. It is a 1995 English language selection, drawn from...
What Shaped 1996
The Women's Prize was founded in response to a Booker shortlist that contained no women at all, at a time when roughly six in ten novels published in Britain were written by women, and it was attacked as sexist by people who had not noticed the arithmetic. It is now among the most respected awards in English. Szymborska, a Polish poet with a small and exact body of work, told her audience that inspiration is not the exclusive property of poets.
Published in 1996, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1996 and took no major award.
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No major prizeFight Club
An unnamed narrator, an insomniac product recall specialist for a car company, attends support groups for illnesses he does not have purely to feel...
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No major prizeInfinite Jest
Set in a near future North America reorganized into the Organization of North American Nations, where corporations buy the naming rights to each...