2002 Book Award Winners
Yann Martel won the Booker for Life of Pi and Richard Russo took the Pulitzer for Empire Falls. Ann Patchett won the Women's Prize for Bel Canto, David McCullough won the biography Pulitzer for John Adams, and Imre Kertész 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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Empire Falls
Miles Roby manages the Empire Grill in Empire Falls, Maine, a town whose textile mill and shirt factory closed and whose river still floods. He has...
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Life of Pi
Piscine Molitor Patel, called Pi, grows up in Pondicherry as the son of a zookeeper, and becomes a practising Hindu, Christian and Muslim...
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Three Junes
Three Junes, three panels, one Scottish family. In the first, June 1989, Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher just widowed, drifts through a package...
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Bel Canto
In an unnamed South American country closely modelled on Peru during the 1996 Japanese embassy hostage crisis, the government throws a birthday...
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Carry Me Home
Diane McWhorter grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a prominent white family, and Carry Me Home is both a history of the city's central role in the...
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The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Louis Menand's Metaphysical Club takes its title from a real discussion group that met briefly in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1870s, and...
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John Adams
David McCullough follows John Adams from a Braintree, Massachusetts boyhood and a Harvard education that led him first toward teaching and then...
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Master of the Senate
Master of the Senate is the third volume of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and its 1,167 pages contain the greatest study of...
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Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
For six months in 1919, Paris was the government of the world. The victors of the Great War gathered to remake the map, and MacMillan's history...
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The Universe in a Nutshell
A Brief History of Time made Hawking the most famous scientist alive and was also more bought than finished. This sequel is his answer to the...
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Practical Gods
Practical Gods reimagines biblical and classical figures inside the texture of ordinary contemporary American life, letting gods, prophets, and...
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Dart
Dart is a single book length poem that follows the River Dart from its source on Dartmoor to the sea at Dartmouth, and its method had no real...
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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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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 Night Class
Caleb Prentiss comes back from Christmas break to his snowbound upstate college and finds a stain on his dormitory room floor and a silence in the...
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Silent Joe
Joe Trona's face is the first fact anyone learns about him: burned in infancy when his father threw acid at him, a scar he has grown up watching...
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A Single Shard
In twelfth century Korea, an orphan called Tree ear lives under a bridge in the potters' village of Ch'ulp'o with Crane man, an older man whose...
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The Three Pigs
Three pigs build their houses exactly as the old story says, and the wolf blows down the straw house and the stick house exactly as expected, until...
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Fatelessness
Gyorgy Koves is fourteen when he is pulled off a Budapest bus with other Jewish men and boys and deported, first to Auschwitz, then to Buchenwald...
What Shaped 2002
Kertész was fifteen when he was deported to Auschwitz, and his Nobel went to a body of work that returns to that experience without ever making it redemptive. Life of Pi, a boy in a lifeboat with a tiger, was rejected by several London publishers before winning the Booker and selling more than ten million copies. Patchett's Bel Canto took a real hostage siege in Peru and turned it into a novel about opera and the strange intimacy of captivity.
Published in 2002, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2002 and took no major award.
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No major prizeCoraline
Coraline Jones, bored and newly moved into an old house divided into flats, finds a small door that opens, at first, onto a bricked up wall. When...
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No major prizeThe Lovely Bones
Susie Salmon, fourteen years old, is murdered by her neighbor George Harvey on December 6, 1973, lured into an underground den he built in a...