2011 Book Award Winners

Winners

• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

  Thirteen chapters, each a self contained story, following a loose constellation of people connected to Bennie Salazar, a record executive who was...

• The Booker Prize
  The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

  Tony Webster is retired, amicably divorced, and content in a way he mistakes for wisdom. Then a solicitor's letter arrives: the mother of a...

• National Book Award for Fiction
  Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

  Esch Batiste is fifteen, motherless, surrounded by brothers in the junk strewn woods of Bois Sauvage on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and she has...

• Women's Prize for Fiction
  The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht

  Natalia is a young doctor crossing a new border in a Balkan country the novel declines to name, carrying vaccines to an orphanage, when word comes...

• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
  The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Siddhartha Mukherjee calls The Emperor of All Maladies a biography of cancer, and he means the term literally, tracing the disease as a single...

• Pulitzer Prize for History
  The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner

  Eric Foner traces Abraham Lincoln's changing views on slavery across his entire political life in The Fiery Trial, beginning with his early...

• Pulitzer Prize for Biography
  Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow

  Ron Chernow follows George Washington from a Virginia childhood cut short by his father's early death, which denied him the formal English...

• National Book Award for Non-Fiction
  The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

  In the winter of 1417, an unemployed papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini rode into a German monastery hunting old manuscripts and found a copy...

• Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
  Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikötter

  Between 1958 and 1962, Mao's Great Leap Forward, the campaign to catapult China past Britain by collectivising everything and conscripting the...

• Royal Society Science Book Prize
  The Wavewatcher's Companion by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

  It begins on a beach in Cornwall, with the author watching breakers with his young daughter and realising he cannot answer her simplest question...

• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
  The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan

  The Best of It draws from forty five years of Kay Ryan's work, gathering her tightly wound, aphoristic poems about persistence, paradox, and the...

• T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry
  Black Cat Bone by John Burnside

  Black Cat Bone takes its title from the blues, the hoodoo talisman that is supposed to grant luck in love or make its carrier invisible, and the...

• Hugo Award for Best Novel
  Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis

  Historians at Oxford in 2060 travel to the past to observe. Three of them go to the Second World War: Michael to Dover for the Dunkirk evacuation,...

• Nebula Award for Best Novel
  Among Others by Jo Walton

  Morwenna Phelps is fifteen, Welsh, walks with a stick, and has been sent to an English boarding school she loathes, having run from a mother who...

• Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel
  Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney

  Houston drowns first. Three hurricanes in quick succession put the city underwater, the chemical corridor's tanks rupture into the flood, and out...

• Edgar Award for Best Novel
  The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton

  Michael has not spoken since he was eight years old, since the day of the trauma the whole book circles and withholds, the event the Michigan...

• Newbery Medal
  Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool

  In 1936, twelve year old Abilene Tucker arrives alone by train in Manifest, Kansas, sent there for the summer by her father Gideon, a man who has...

• Caldecott Medal
  A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Erin E. Stead

  Amos McGee works at the city zoo and keeps the same careful routine with five animal friends every single day: a game of chess with the elephant, a...

• Nobel Prize in Literature
  The Great Enigma by Tomas Tranströmer

  The Great Enigma is Robin Fulton's English translation of Tomas Tranströmer's collected poetry, gathering five decades of short, tightly built...

Published in 2011, Won Nothing

Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2011 and took no major award.

• No major prize
  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

  By 2045 the real world has decayed into stacked trailer slums and fuel shortages, and most people spend their waking hours inside the OASIS, a...

• No major prize
  The Martian by Andy Weir

  During a dust storm on Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is struck by flying debris and left for dead when the rest of his Ares 3 crew evacuates the...