2009 Book Award Winners
Hilary Mantel won the Booker for Wolf Hall and Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge. Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book won both the Newbery Medal and the Hugo Award, and Herta Müller received the Nobel.
19 prizes awarded · 1 notable book that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Olive Kitteridge
Thirteen stories set in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Maine. In some of them Olive Kitteridge, a retired seventh grade mathematics teacher,...
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Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell is a blacksmith's son from Putney who has been a soldier, a merchant and a lawyer, and who arrives at the centre of English power...
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Let the Great World Spin
On the morning of 7 August 1974, a man appears in the sky over lower Manhattan, walking a cable strung between the not yet loved Twin Towers, and...
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Home
Glory Boughton, thirty eight, her engagement collapsed and her teaching career with it, has come home to Gilead, Iowa, to keep house for her dying...
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Slavery by Another Name
Douglas A. Blackmon argues that slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War but persisted, in a different legal form, well into the...
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The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Annette Gordon-Reed follows four generations of the Hemings family, enslaved at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, from their origins through...
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American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
Jon Meacham narrows his focus to Andrew Jackson's eight years in the White House, opening just after the 1828 election victory that was shadowed...
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The First Tycoon
Cornelius Vanderbilt lived from 1794 to 1877, from Washington's presidency to the Gilded Age he did as much as anyone to create, and The First...
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Leviathan or, The Whale
Philip Hoare has been afraid of deep water all his life and obsessed with whales almost as long, and this book is the working out of that double...
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The Age of Wonder
Holmes's subject is the generation the history of science had filed under prelude: the British science of the Romantic age, between Cook's voyages...
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The Shadow of Sirius
The Shadow of Sirius returns W. S. Merwin to memory, lost dogs, light, and the deepening quiet of late life, written in the unpunctuated lines he...
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The Water Table
The Water Table is a book about the Severn estuary, the brown, tide torn water between Wales and England with one of the highest tidal ranges in...
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The Graveyard Book
A man named Jack murders a family in their house one night. The toddler, who has climbed out of his cot and wandered off, escapes up the hill and...
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The Windup Girl
Bangkok, in the twenty third century. The oil is gone, the seas have risen, and the city survives behind levees and pumps kept running by a king's...
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Audrey's Door
Audrey Lucas has assembled herself against the odds, out of a vagabond childhood spent managing a mother whose mental illness kept them moving one...
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Blue Heaven
Annie Taylor, twelve, takes her little brother William fishing in the North Idaho woods, and they see what children should never see: four men...
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The Graveyard Book
A man named Jack murders a family in their house one night. The toddler, who has climbed out of his cot and wandered off, escapes up the hill and...
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The House in the Night
Susan Marie Swanson's spare, rhythmic text follows a key, a house, a bed, a book, and a bird through a single bedtime sequence, an accumulating...
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The Hunger Angel
Leo Auberg is seventeen and lives in Sibiu, in the German speaking Transylvanian minority of Romania, when Soviet forces arrest him in January 1945...
What Shaped 2009
Gaiman's double is unique: no other book has taken both the Newbery Medal for American children's literature and the Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy. Mantel's Wolf Hall put Thomas Cromwell at the centre of the Tudor court in the present tense and made a trilogy that would win her a second Booker three years later. Müller's Nobel honoured a writer who had been persecuted by the Romanian secret police before escaping to Germany.
Published in 2009, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2009 and took no major award.
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No major prizeThe Help
Eugenia Skeeter Phelan returns to Jackson, Mississippi, from college in the early 1960s and, unlike her friends, starts noticing how completely the...