2016 Book Award Winners
Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first songwriter ever to receive it. Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer for The Sympathizer, Paul Beatty became the first American to win the Booker with The Sellout, and N. K. Jemisin took the Hugo for The Fifth Season.
19 prizes awarded · 3 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Sympathizer
The narrator is a captain in the South Vietnamese secret police, the illegitimate son of a French priest and a Vietnamese teenager, educated in...
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The Sellout
The narrator, known as Bonbon, grew up in Dickens, a poor and agricultural corner of Los Angeles, raised by a father who conducted psychological...
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The Underground Railroad
Cora is enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation, an outcast among the other enslaved people because her mother ran and left her. When Caesar, newly...
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The Glorious Heresies
A woman kills an intruder in her kitchen with a religious ornament, and because she is the mother of the man who runs organised crime in Cork, the...
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Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
Joby Warrick tells the story of the Islamic State primarily through the life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose brutal insurgent...
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Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
T. J. Stiles built Custer's Trials as a full biography of George Armstrong Custer, deliberately refusing to let the general's death overshadow the...
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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
This is William Finnegan's own account of a life organized almost entirely around waves, beginning with a childhood split between Los Angeles and...
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Stamped from the Beginning
Stamped from the Beginning is a history of racist ideas in America, and its central claim reverses the story most readers carry: racist ideas,...
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East West Street
Invited to lecture in Lviv, the western Ukrainian city that has been Lemberg, Lwów and Lvov inside a single lifetime, the human rights barrister...
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The Invention of Nature
Alexander von Humboldt was, around 1820, the most famous scientist in the world: the Prussian explorer whose name is still on more places, species...
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Ozone Journal
Ozone Journal centers on an extended title sequence of fifty four individual sections, each one working as a poem in itself while also building...
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Jackself
Jackself tells a childhood, but slant: its hero is Jackself, a boy assembled from the Jacks of English folklore and idiom, Jack Frost, Jack...
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The Fifth Season
The world is called the Stillness, which is a joke, because the continent is tectonically murderous and civilisation is organised entirely around...
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All the Birds in the Sky
Patricia Delfine talks to a bird when she is six and is told she is a witch. Laurence Armstead builds a two second time machine out of a wristwatch...
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The Fisherman
Abe lost his wife to cancer two years into the marriage, and fishing is what he did instead of drinking. Dan, younger, lost his wife and both sons...
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Let Me Die in His Footsteps
Roy's Kentucky is lavender country, hills of it, worked by families whose feuds have root systems, and her novel runs on two timelines a generation...
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Last Stop on Market Street
Every Sunday after church, a boy named CJ and his grandmother, Nana, ride the bus across their city to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and this...
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Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear
In 1914, a Canadian army veterinarian named Harry Colebourn bought an orphaned black bear cub for twenty dollars at a railway station in White...
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The Lyrics
The Lyrics collects six decades of Bob Dylan's songs as text on the page, stripped of melody and performance and left to stand as writing alone....
What Shaped 2016
Dylan's Nobel split opinion completely and he did not respond for two weeks, then skipped the ceremony. Jemisin became the first Black writer to win the Hugo for best novel, the first of three consecutive wins that no author had managed before. Beatty's satire on race in America won a Booker that had been open to Americans for two years. Britain voted to leave the European Union in June and Donald Trump was elected in November.
Published in 2016, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2016 and took no major award.
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No major prizeA Gentleman in Moscow
In June 1922, a Bolshevik tribunal sentences Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat whose family estate was seized after the revolution, to spend...
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No major prizeThe Girls
In the summer of 1969, fourteen year old Evie Boyd drifts through a lonely stretch of her adolescence in Petaluma, California, unmoored by her...
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No major prizeThe Nix
Samuel Andresen-Anderson is an English professor at a college outside Chicago, still years overdue on a novel his publisher paid him to write, and...