2008 Book Award Winners
Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the poetry prize was shared between Robert Hass's Time and Materials and Philip Schultz's Failure. Aravind Adiga won the Booker for The White Tiger, Peter Matthiessen took the National Book Award for Shadow Country, and Annette Gordon-Reed won for The Hemingses of Monticello.
20 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar de Leon is an overweight Dominican American teenager in New Jersey who writes fantasy novels, loves role playing games, and cannot get a girl...
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The White Tiger
Balram Halwai writes seven letters to the Premier of China, who is shortly to visit Bangalore, because he feels the Premier should hear about...
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Shadow Country
On an October evening in 1910, in the aftermath of a hurricane, the men of Chokoloskee Island, Florida stand on the shore with their guns and wait...
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The Road Home
Lev is in his forties, newly widowed, from Auror, a village in an unnamed Eastern European country where the sawmill has closed and nothing is...
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The Years of Extermination
The Years of Extermination covers the Holocaust from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to its end in 1945, the second half of Saul...
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What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought follows the United States through the three decades after the War of 1812, a period Howe deliberately...
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Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
John Matteson's debut book tells the intertwined lives of Louisa May Alcott and her father, the transcendentalist philosopher and reformer Amos...
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The Hemingses of Monticello
The Hemingses of Monticello does something no book about slavery had done at this scale: it takes a single enslaved family and gives it the full...
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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
On a June night in 1860, inside a locked and respectable Wiltshire country house, three year old Saville Kent was taken from his cot, and found the...
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Six Degrees
Lynas's design is the simplest and most effective in climate writing: one chapter per degree. Take the range of warming the models offered for this...
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Failure
Failure is Philip Schultz's sixth collection, published by Harcourt in 2007: thirty poems in 106 pages, most of them short, followed by one long...
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Time and Materials
Time and Materials gathers lyric observation, political reflection, and ecological attention into a wide ranging meditation on what time makes and...
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Nigh-No-Place
Nigh-No-Place was written between two enormous silences, the Canadian interior and the Shetland Islands, and it made Jen Hadfield, at thirty, the...
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The premise is a single change to history. In 1940 the United States opens Alaska to Jewish refugees, so the destroyed millions instead arrive in...
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Powers
Gavir is a slave in the city state of Etra, which is modelled closely on the Roman Republic: a household of educated slaves, treated well by their...
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Duma Key
Edgar Freemantle, a Minneapolis construction millionaire, is crushed by a crane on one of his own sites: he loses his right arm, part of his memory...
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Down River
Adam Chase left Rowan County, North Carolina, with an acquittal instead of an absolution: tried for the death of a local boy and acquitted even...
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Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village
Laura Amy Schlitz built this collection of monologues for the fifth graders she taught as a school librarian, and it keeps that classroom origin...
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The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Twelve year old Hugo Cabret lives secretly inside the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping its clocks running after his father's...
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Desert
J. M. G. Le Clézio tells two stories that never directly meet but keep answering each other across the length of the novel. The first follows a boy...
What Shaped 2008
Gordon-Reed's book established as history what had long been denied, that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with the enslaved Sally Hemings, and told the whole family's story across generations. Díaz's novel of a Dominican American family, footnoted and switching between English and Spanish without apology, won the Pulitzer for a first novel. Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008 and the financial system nearly went with it, and Barack Obama was elected in November.
Published in 2008, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2008 and took no major award.
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No major prize2666
Four European literary critics, obsessed with a reclusive and possibly mythical German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi, follow rumors of his...
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No major prizeThe Hunger Games
Sixteen year old Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister Prim's place in the seventy fourth Hunger Games, an annual televised fight...