2015 Book Award Winners
Anthony Doerr won the Pulitzer for All the Light We Cannot See and Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Booker, for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Ta-Nehisi Coates took the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, and Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem became the first translated novel to win the Hugo.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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All the Light We Cannot See
Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind, and her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, builds her a scale model of their...
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A Brief History of Seven Killings
In December 1976, two days before a free concert intended to calm Jamaica's election violence, seven gunmen walked into Bob Marley's house on Hope...
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Fortune Smiles
Six long stories, each built on a premise most writers would flinch from, each carried to its human conclusion with unnerving tenderness. In...
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How to Be Both
One half of this novel belongs to George, a fiercely clever sixteen year old in Cambridge whose mother has suddenly died, leaving her with a...
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The Sixth Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert argues that the planet is living through a sixth mass extinction, driven this time not by an asteroid or a shift in the climate...
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Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Elizabeth Fenn's Encounters at the Heart of the World tells the history of the Mandan, a Native nation that farmed and traded for centuries along...
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The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
David Kertzer builds his account of Pope Pius XI, a former Vatican librarian and expert mountaineer elected pope in 1922, around one of the most...
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Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me is written as a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his fifteen year old son Samori, in the year of Ferguson and the non...
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NeuroTribes
Silberman's history begins with a puzzle from his reporting years: why did Silicon Valley seem to be full of autistic children? The answer he found...
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Adventures in the Anthropocene
Vince begins with the scientific proposal that gives the book its title: that humanity has ended the Holocene and begun a new geological epoch, the...
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Digest
Digest takes its title from Gregory Pardlo's own account of the book's method: he began the collection in 2004 as an effort to mesh academic and...
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Loop of Jade
Loop of Jade did something no book had done in the T.S. Eliot Prize's twenty two years: it won as a debut. Sarah Howe was born in Hong Kong to an...
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The Three-Body Problem
It opens during the Cultural Revolution, with a physicist beaten to death at a struggle session in front of his daughter for teaching relativity....
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Uprooted
Every ten years the wizard called the Dragon takes a seventeen year old girl from the valley. She serves in his tower for a decade and comes back...
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A Head Full of Ghosts
The Barrett family of Beverly, Massachusetts came apart on television. Fourteen year old Marjorie began to change, voices, threats, blasphemies,...
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Mr. Mercedes
In the grey hour before a job fair opens, in a Midwestern city the recession has already beaten, a stolen Mercedes accelerates into the waiting...
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The Crossover
Josh Bell is twelve, plays basketball with his twin brother Jordan, and narrates the whole novel in verse. He calls himself Filthy McNasty, he can...
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The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend
Beekle is born on a distant island where imaginary friends wait, sometimes for a very long time, to be imagined and named by an actual child...
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Voices from Chernobyl
Alexievich spent years interviewing the people the Chernobyl disaster happened to, and then removed herself from the result. What remains is a book...
What Shaped 2015
Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his teenage son about living in a Black body in America, and it arrived in the middle of the movement that followed the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Liu's Hugo opened English language science fiction to Chinese writing, and its translator Ken Liu became a significant figure in his own right. Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel for oral histories assembled from thousands of interviews.
Published in 2015, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2015 and took no major award.
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No major prizeA Little Life
A warning first, because this book requires one. A Little Life contains sustained and explicit depiction of childhood sexual abuse, self harm and...
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No major prizeThe Girl on the Train
Rachel Watson, thirty three, unemployed, and drinking heavily, rides the same commuter train every day, partly to hide her firing from the roommate...