2004 Book Award Winners
Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer for The Known World, a year after taking the National Book Award for it. Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker for The Line of Beauty, Andrea Levy won the Women's Prize for Small Island, and Anne Applebaum took the non fiction Pulitzer for Gulag.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Known World
Henry Townsend is a Black farmer and bootmaker in Manchester County, Virginia, in the years before the Civil War. He was born enslaved. His father...
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The Line of Beauty
Nick Guest, twenty and just down from Oxford, moves into the attic of a house in Notting Hill belonging to the family of his college friend Toby...
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The News from Paraguay
Paris, 1854: Francisco Solano López, the stout, vain son of Paraguay's dictator, on a European shopping tour for uniforms and ideas, sees a red...
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Small Island
London, 1948, and four narrators take turns. Hortense has sailed from Jamaica with her teaching certificates, her gloves and her exact BBC diction,...
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Gulag: A History
Anne Applebaum tells the history of the Soviet Gulag, the vast system of forced labor camps that held millions of prisoners from the early years of...
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A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet follows Black political life in the rural South across six decades, from slavery through Reconstruction and...
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Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
William Taubman follows Nikita Khrushchev from a peasant childhood in the Russian village of Kalinovka, where his father worked in the Donbas coal...
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Arc of Justice
In September 1925, a Black physician named Ossian Sweet bought a house on a white block of Detroit and moved in knowing exactly what would come,...
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Stasiland
In the mid 1990s Anna Funder, a young Australian working for German television in Berlin, became fascinated by the question her colleagues found...
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bryson's premise disarms on page one: the bestselling travel writer realised he did not know the difference between a proton and a protein, could...
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Walking to Martha's Vineyard
Walking to Martha's Vineyard writes from deep inside addiction, mental illness, and a tentative, hard won spiritual recovery, tracking a mind that...
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Reel
George Szirtes was eight years old when his family fled Budapest after the crushed uprising of 1956, and Reel is the book in which a lifetime of...
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Paladin of Souls
Ista is forty, a dowager royina, and everyone around her believes she is mad. She spent years cursed, watched her husband and her house destroyed...
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Paladin of Souls
Ista is forty, a dowager royina, and everyone around her believes she is mad. She spent years cursed, watched her husband and her house destroyed...
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In the Night Room
Tim Underhill, months after the events that took his nephew, is writing a novel about a woman named Willy Patrick when the emails begin arriving...
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Resurrection Men
John Rebus has thrown a mug of tea at his detective chief superintendent, which is how Edinburgh's most insubordinate inspector lands at...
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The Tale of Despereaux
Despereaux Tilling is born the runt of his litter in a castle, a mouse with oversized ears and, most unforgivably to the rest of mouse society, his...
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The Man Who Walked Between the Towers
On August 7, 1974, the French high wire artist Philippe Petit walked a cable strung between the still unfinished towers of the World Trade Center,...
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The Piano Teacher
Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory, is thirty six years old, and still shares a bed with her mother, who has run every part of...
What Shaped 2004
Hollinghurst's Booker was the first for an openly gay novel about gay life, set in the Thatcher years as AIDS arrives, and several British newspapers reported the win with visible discomfort. Levy's Small Island, about Jamaican migrants in postwar London, became the book that told the Windrush generation's story to a mass audience. Applebaum's history of the Soviet camps appeared as the archives that made it possible were beginning to close again.
Published in 2004, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2004 and took no major award.
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No major prizeCloud Atlas
Six narratives nest inside one another like a set of Russian dolls, each interrupted mid sentence by the next and resumed, in reverse order, once...
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No major prizeThe Plot Against America
Charles Lindbergh, running as an isolationist Republican, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election in Roth's alternate history,...