2017 Book Award Winners
Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer for The Underground Railroad, having taken the National Book Award for it the year before. George Saunders won the Booker for Lincoln in the Bardo, Jesmyn Ward took a second National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Kazuo Ishiguro received the Nobel.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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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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Lincoln in the Bardo
In February 1862 Abraham Lincoln's eleven year old son Willie died of typhoid, and Lincoln reportedly returned to the crypt more than once to hold...
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jojo is thirteen, growing up in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, in the household that actually raises him: Pop, his grandfather, dignity itself,...
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The Power
Teenage girls discover they can generate electricity from their hands. It hurts, it can kill, and once the older women are woken to it too the...
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Evicted
Matthew Desmond spent more than a year living in a trailer park and a rooming house on Milwaukee's poorest blocks to write Evicted, and the book...
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Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water reconstructs the Attica Prison uprising from the inside, beginning on September 9, 1971, when roughly...
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The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
This is Hisham Matar's own account of returning to Libya in 2012, after decades away, to search for the truth about his father Jaballa Matar, a...
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The Future Is History
The Future Is History tells how Russia, offered an open future in 1991, closed it again, and Masha Gessen tells it through seven lives instead of a...
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How to Survive a Plague
France's history of the AIDS activist movement begins where he began, a young gay reporter in New York in 1981, covering a rumour of a new cancer,...
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Testosterone Rex
Testosterone Rex is Fine's name for the beast she means to hunt: the familiar story in which testosterone, acting on ancient evolutionary...
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Olio
Olio constructs a sweeping, polyphonic portrait of Black performers working between the Civil War and the First World War, a period Tyehimba Jess...
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Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Night Sky with Exit Wounds arrived as close to a legend as a poetry debut can: Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon in 1988, carried through a refugee...
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The Obelisk Gate
Start with the warning that matters most: this is the second book of a trilogy and it makes no concessions to anyone who has not read the first....
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The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth, and it should not be read first. Essun has crossed a dying continent looking for her daughter and has...
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Ararat
An earthquake and avalanche on Mount Ararat crack open a cave high on the Turkish mountain, and inside is the find of the century: the timbers of...
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Before the Fall
A private jet lifts off from Martha's Vineyard in night fog with eleven aboard: David Bateman, founder of a combative cable news empire, his wife...
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The Girl Who Drank the Moon
Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave their youngest baby in the forest as a sacrifice to the witch they believe haunts it, certain this...
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Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Javaka Steptoe traces the childhood and early career of the painter Jean Michel Basquiat, from a boy in Brooklyn surrounded by his mother's...
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The Remains of the Day
Stevens has been butler at Darlington Hall for thirty years. In 1956, with the house sold to an American and the staff reduced to four, he takes...
What Shaped 2017
Whitehead made the underground railroad a literal railway beneath the South, which frees the novel to move through different versions of America the way a nightmare does. Ward became the first woman to win the National Book Award for fiction twice. Saunders, known for stories, won the Booker with a first novel narrated by a graveyard of ghosts. In October the Weinstein reporting broke and MeToo became a mass movement within weeks.
Published in 2017, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2017 and took no major award.
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No major prizeLittle Fires Everywhere
In the meticulously planned Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights in the late 1990s, Elena Richardson rents a modest duplex to Mia Warren, an...
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No major prizePachinko
Pachinko opens in a fishing village near Busan not long after Japan's 1910 annexation of Korea, where a disabled innkeeper's daughter, Sunja, is...