2018 Book Award Winners
Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer for Less and Anna Burns won the Booker for Milkman, the first writer from Northern Ireland to take it. N. K. Jemisin won a third consecutive Hugo for The Stone Sky, and no Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded.
19 prizes awarded · 4 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Less
Arthur Less is a novelist of modest reputation about to turn fifty. His partner of nine years has become engaged to someone else and has sent an...
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Milkman
An eighteen year old woman, named only as middle sister, walks around reading nineteenth century novels and is noticed by a much older paramilitary...
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The Friend
A writer's oldest friend, her teacher and lifelong complicated love, kills himself, and among the things he leaves unresolved is Apollo, a...
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Home Fire
Isma Pasha has spent her twenties raising her twin siblings in Wembley after their mother's death, their jihadi father having died en route to...
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Locking Up Our Own
James Forman Jr. spent years as a public defender in Washington, D.C. before writing Locking Up Our Own, and the book grew directly out of a...
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The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Jack E. Davis writes an environmental history of the Gulf of Mexico that begins with its geological formation and carries the story to the present...
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Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Caroline Fraser follows Laura Ingalls Wilder from a pioneer childhood far harder than the Little House books ever let on, a family that moved...
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The New Negro
The New Negro is Jeffrey C. Stewart's monumental biography of Alain Locke, the philosopher who midwifed the Harlem Renaissance, and it restores to...
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Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy
At 1.23 in the morning of 26 April 1986, during a safety test run behind schedule and against protocol, reactor number four at the Chernobyl...
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Inventing Ourselves
Blakemore's opening move is to take the most mocked demographic on earth and declare the mockery a scientific error. The teenage brain is not a...
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Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016
This collected volume gathers Frank Bidart's work across five decades, from 1965 to 2016, into a single career spanning book that lets a reader...
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Three Poems
Three Poems is exactly what its title says, and the plainness is the provocation: Hannah Sullivan's debut consists of three long poems, each...
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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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The Calculating Stars
On a cold morning in March 1952 a meteorite hits the water off the coast of Maryland and destroys Washington and most of the eastern seaboard. Elma...
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The Cabin at the End of the World
Seven year old Wen is catching grasshoppers in front of a remote New Hampshire lake cabin while her fathers, Eric and Andrew, relax inside, when a...
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Bluebird, Bluebird
Darren Mathews is a Black Texas Ranger raised by twin uncles who embodied the region's two answers to being a Black man in law country, one a...
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Hello, Universe
Four middle schoolers whose lives would otherwise never intersect converge over a single day in this novel, which moves between their perspectives...
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Wolf in the Snow
A young girl walking home through a heavy snowstorm becomes separated from her family at the same time that a wolf cub loses track of its own pack...
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Flights
Flights has no single story to follow. Olga Tokarczuk builds the novel out of roughly a hundred fragments, some no longer than a paragraph, others...
What Shaped 2018
The Swedish Academy suspended its 2018 prize after a scandal involving sexual assault allegations against the husband of a member, leaks of laureates' names, and resignations that left the body unable to function. Two prizes were awarded the following year, and Olga Tokarczuk received the 2018 one. Burns's Milkman, narrated by a young woman in an unnamed Belfast during the Troubles, was called difficult by reviewers and read widely anyway. Jemisin's third straight Hugo has no precedent.
Published in 2018, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2018 and took no major award.
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No major prizeCirce
Circe narrates her own story for the first time, beginning as an awkward, overlooked daughter of the sun god Helios, mocked by her siblings and...
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No major prizeEducated
Tara Westover grows up on Buck's Peak, Idaho, the youngest child of survivalist Mormon parents who reject hospitals, public schooling, and...
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No major prizeNormal People
Connell and Marianne go to the same school in a small town in County Sligo. He is popular and she is not. His mother cleans her family's house....
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No major prizeWhere the Crawdads Sing
Kya Clark is six years old when her mother walks away from an abusive husband and the family shack in the North Carolina marshes near the invented...