2001 Book Award Winners
Michael Chabon won the Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Jonathan Franzen took the National Book Award for The Corrections, Peter Carey won a second Booker for True History of the Kelly Gang, and V. S. Naipaul received the Nobel.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
In 1939 Josef Kavalier is smuggled out of Prague in a coffin, alongside the Golem, by the escape artist who trained him. He arrives in his aunt's...
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True History of the Kelly Gang
Ned Kelly, the Irish Australian bushranger hanged in Melbourne in 1880 at the age of twenty five, tells his own story in thirteen parcels of paper...
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The Corrections
Alfred Lambert, retired railroad engineer, upright to the point of cruelty, is coming apart: Parkinson's disease and dementia are dismantling him...
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The Idea of Perfection
Karakarook, New South Wales, population a few hundred, has one claim on the future: heritage tourism, if it can decide what its heritage is. The...
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Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Herbert P. Bix sets out to overturn the long standing postwar image of Emperor Hirohito as a passive, largely powerless figurehead who had little...
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Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Ellis takes the American founding apart into six episodes and looks hard at what happened inside each one. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton meet...
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W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963
David Levering Lewis closes his two volume life of W. E. B. Du Bois with the decades in which the scholar and activist who helped found the NAACP...
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The Noonday Demon
The Noonday Demon calls itself an atlas of depression, and the claim is exact: Andrew Solomon set out to map the whole territory of the illness...
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The Third Reich: A New History
Burleigh's single volume history of Nazi Germany opens with a question the political histories had stopped asking: what did Nazism feel like from...
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Mapping the Deep
The deep ocean is the largest habitat on earth and the least examined, and Kunzig's book is the great tour of what the explorers of it had learned...
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Different Hours
Different Hours gathers poems that examine a life already well underway, middle age, a long marriage, and the accumulated small compromises a...
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The Beauty of the Husband
The Beauty of the Husband calls itself a fictional essay in twenty nine tangos, and the form is the meaning: the tango is a dance you cannot do...
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The fourth book is where the series stops being about school. It opens at the Quidditch World Cup, where masked wizards attack the campsite...
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The Quantum Rose
Kamoj Argali governs a small province on Balumil, a backward and increasingly hungry world that lost contact with the rest of human civilisation...
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American Gods
Shadow is three days from the end of a prison sentence when he is released early, because his wife has died in a car accident. He learns at the...
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The Bottoms
Harry Crane is an old man in a rest home when he tells it, but in 1933 he was eleven, in the East Texas river bottoms, on the day he and his little...
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A Year Down Yonder
Fifteen year old Mary Alice is sent from Chicago to spend a year with her grandmother in rural Illinois in 1937 and 1938, after her family's...
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So You Want to Be President?
Judith St. George's text surveys the American presidency itself rather than any single president, gathering trivia and patterns across the 42 men...
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A House for Mr Biswas
Mohun Biswas is born in rural Trinidad under signs his own family reads as bad luck, breech, six fingered, delivered by a midwife who pronounces...
What Shaped 2001
Chabon's novel about two Jewish cousins inventing a comic book superhero as their relatives are trapped in occupied Europe treats a disreputable form with complete seriousness. Franzen's National Book Award came in the middle of a public argument with Oprah Winfrey's book club over whether her endorsement would cost him serious readers, which made him famous in a way the novel alone would not have. The prizes were awarded in the weeks after September 11.
Published in 2001, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2001 and took no major award.
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No major prizeAusterlitz
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, tells his life story in fragments to an unnamed narrator he keeps meeting by chance in railway...
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No major prizeThe Shadow of the Wind
In Barcelona just after the Spanish Civil War, a bookseller named Sempere takes his ten year old son Daniel to a hidden archive called the Cemetery...