2003 Book Award Winners
Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer for Middlesex. Edward P. Jones took the National Book Award for The Known World, DBC Pierre won the Booker for Vernon God Little, and J. M. Coetzee received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Middlesex
Cal Stephanides, forty one and working for the American diplomatic service in Berlin, sets out to explain how he came to be born a girl and to...
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Vernon God Little
Vernon Gregory Little is fifteen and lives in Martirio, Texas, the barbecue sauce capital of central Texas, where his best friend Jesus has just...
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The Great Fire
Occupied Japan, 1947. Aldred Leith is thirty two, a British officer decorated in the war and the son of a famous novelist, and he has come east to...
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Property
Manon Gaudet narrates, and Manon Gaudet is the experiment: a novel of slavery told entirely from inside the head of a slaveholding woman, without a...
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'A Problem from Hell'
Samantha Power built the book from a paper she first wrote in law school, and it grew into a full survey of how the United States responded, or...
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An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943
Rick Atkinson opens the Liberation Trilogy with An Army at Dawn, following the American and British armies as they invade French North Africa in...
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Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Robert Caro devotes the third volume of his life of Lyndon Johnson entirely to the years Johnson spent inside the United States Senate, opening...
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Waiting for Snow in Havana
Waiting for Snow in Havana is Carlos Eire's memoir of a Havana boyhood ended by revolution, and it reads like nothing else in the literature of...
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Pushkin: A Biography
Alexander Pushkin is the writer Russians put where the English put Shakespeare, and Binyon's biography opens with the problem that position...
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Right Hand, Left Hand
Why is the heart on the left? Why are most people right handed, in every culture and as far back as the tools and cave stencils go, and why, if...
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Moy Sand and Gravel
Moy Sand and Gravel takes its title from a business that once operated near The Moy, the small County Armagh townland where Paul Muldoon grew up on...
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Landing Light
Paterson is a Dundee poet who was a working jazz guitarist before he was anything else, and the ear shows on every page. Landing Light is the...
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Hominids
In a parallel world, Neanderthals became the dominant human species and Homo sapiens died out. Their civilisation has no agriculture as we would...
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The Speed of Dark
Lou Arrendale is autistic, works in a bioinformatics division where a whole unit of autistic employees is employed for pattern recognition nobody...
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Lost Boy, Lost Girl
A week after Nancy Underhill, a Millhaven wife and mother, kills herself for no reason anyone can name, her fifteen year old son Mark vanishes...
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Winter and Night
The call comes to Bill Smith at two in the morning, from an NYPD lockup: a fifteen year old picked up for helping street kids roll a drunk has...
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Crispin: The Cross of Lead
In an English village in 1377, a thirteen year old peasant boy known only as Asta's son loses his mother and, within days, finds himself falsely...
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My Friend Rabbit
Mouse lends his new toy airplane to his best friend Rabbit, and within moments Rabbit has managed to fly it straight into the top of a tree, out of...
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Disgrace
David Lurie is fifty two, twice divorced, and teaching communications at a Cape Town technical university where the Romantic poetry he cares about...
What Shaped 2003
Middlesex tells three generations of a Greek American family through a narrator born intersex, and it did more than any novel of its decade to put that experience into general readership. Jones's The Known World is about a Black slaveholder in Virginia, a fact of American history most readers did not know and which the novel refuses to simplify. The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, and the human genome was declared complete in April.
Published in 2003, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2003 and took no major award.
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No major prizeThe Kite Runner
Amir grows up privileged in 1970s Kabul alongside Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant Ali, and the two boys are inseparable until the...
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No major prizeThe Time Traveler's Wife
Henry DeTamble has a genetic condition that periodically and involuntarily rips him out of the present and drops him, naked, into some other point...