2020 Book Award Winners
Colson Whitehead won a second Pulitzer for The Nickel Boys, joining a handful of writers who have taken the fiction prize twice. Douglas Stuart won the Booker for Shuggie Bain, Maggie O'Farrell won the Women's Prize for Hamnet, and Louise Glück received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
20 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Nickel Boys
Elwood Curtis is a serious, hopeful Black teenager in Tallahassee in the early 1960s, raised by his grandmother, who has worn out a record of...
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Shuggie Bain
Glasgow in the 1980s, with the pits and the yards closing and Thatcher's government showing no particular interest. Agnes Bain is glamorous, proud,...
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Interior Chinatown
Willis Wu lives above the Golden Palace restaurant in a Chinatown SRO and works, in every sense, as Generic Asian Man: background player in Black...
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Hamnet
Stratford, 1596. A boy of eleven searches the house and yard for an adult, any adult, because his twin sister Judith has fallen suddenly ill, and...
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The End of the Myth
Greg Grandin traces the idea of the American frontier from the country's founding through the election of Donald Trump, arguing that the frontier...
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The Undying
Anne Boyer was a single mother living paycheck to paycheck, a week past her forty first birthday, when she was diagnosed with aggressive triple...
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Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
W. Caleb McDaniel tells the story of Henrietta Wood, a woman born into slavery in Kentucky around 1819 who was freed, kidnapped back into bondage...
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Sontag: Her Life and Work
Benjamin Moser follows Susan Sontag from a childhood scattered across the American West after her father's early death, through a University of...
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The Dead Are Arising
Les Payne, a Pulitzer winning investigative reporter and Newsday editor, spent nearly thirty years interviewing everyone still alive who had known...
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One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
There are hundreds of Beatles books, and Craig Brown's wager is that the only honest form left is the kaleidoscope: one hundred and fifty odd short...
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Explaining Humans
Pang was diagnosed autistic at eight, and at five had asked her mother whether there was an instruction manual for humans, a manual for the species...
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The Tradition
The Tradition confronts anti Black violence, queer desire, illness, and inherited trauma directly, insisting throughout that tenderness itself can...
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How to Wash a Heart
A short book with a single situation running through it. An immigrant guest is taken in by a citizen host. The host is generous, liberal, pleased...
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A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives in the capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire as ambassador from Lsel Station, a mining habitat of thirty thousand people that has...
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Network Effect
Murderbot is a security construct, part cloned tissue and part machine, that hacked its own governor module years ago and could kill everyone in...
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The Only Good Indians
Ten years ago, four young Blackfeet men drove into the section of the reservation reserved for the elders and shot into a winter elk herd, and one...
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The Stranger Diaries
Clare Cassidy teaches English at Talgarth High, a comprehensive school whose Victorian wing was the home of R. M. Holland, a minor gothic writer...
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New Kid
Jordan Banks would rather draw comics than do almost anything else, but his parents enroll him at Riverdale Academy Day School, a prestigious,...
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The Undefeated
Kwame Alexander's poem moves across generations of Black American history in short, propulsive lines, naming both the horrors the country...
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The Wild Iris
The Wild Iris is built around a single New England garden and moves through a full growing season, spring to the end of summer, in poems voiced by...
What Shaped 2020
The prizes were announced into a year of closed bookshops and cancelled everything as the pandemic spread, and reading went up sharply while the industry that supplies it nearly seized. The Nickel Boys is based on a real Florida reform school where boys were beaten and buried in unmarked graves, and it won months after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. Stuart's Shuggie Bain, a first novel about a boy caring for his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow, was rejected more than thirty times.
Published in 2020, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2020 and took no major award.
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No major prizeMexican Gothic
In 1950s Mexico City, Noemi Taboada, a socialite studying anthropology, is sent by her father to the remote mountain town of El Triunfo after her...
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No major prizeThe Vanishing Half
Identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in Mallard, Louisiana, a town founded generations earlier by a formerly enslaved man...