2021 Book Award Winners
Louise Erdrich won the Pulitzer for The Night Watchman, based on her grandfather's fight against a federal attempt to terminate his tribe. Damon Galgut won the Booker for The Promise, Susanna Clarke won the Women's Prize for Piranesi, and Abdulrazak Gurnah 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 Night Watchman
Thomas Wazhashk works nights as a watchman at the jewel bearing plant near the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota, and spends the quiet...
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The Promise
A white family on a farm outside Pretoria loses its mother, and at the deathbed the youngest child overhears a promise. Rachel Swart has asked her...
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Hell of a Book
An unnamed Black novelist is on tour for his runaway bestseller, which is called Hell of a Book, and he is very good at the job: charming on...
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Piranesi
A man lives in a House of infinite marble halls, peopled by thousands of statues, no two alike. The lower halls belong to an ocean whose tides...
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Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
David Zucchino reconstructs the events of November 10, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a mob of roughly two thousand white men overthrew...
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Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
Marcia Chatelain traces how McDonald's became embedded in Black neighborhoods across the country in the decades after the civil rights movement,...
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The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Les Payne spent nearly three decades interviewing everyone he could find who had known Malcolm X, family members, childhood friends, fellow inmates...
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All That She Carried
In the 1850s, in Charleston, an enslaved woman named Rose learned that her nine year old daughter Ashley was about to be sold away from her. She...
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Empire of Pain
The Sackler name was on museum wings from the Met to the Louvre, and the family's founding gift was invisibility: almost nobody knew where the...
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Entangled Life
Fungi are neither plants nor animals but a kingdom of their own, mostly invisible, mostly unstudied, and, Sheldrake's book argues with mounting...
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Postcolonial Love Poem
Postcolonial Love Poem writes love poems in which Indigenous survival, queer desire, and the politics of water cannot be separated from one...
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C+nto & Othered Poems
C+nto & Othered Poems reclaims two things at once, the word the title barely veils and the history it belongs to: the butch lesbian counterculture...
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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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A Master of Djinn
Cairo in 1912, in a world where a Sudanese mystic tore open the barrier to the realm of the djinn forty years earlier. Egypt consequently...
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My Heart Is a Chainsaw
Jade Daniels is seventeen, half Blackfeet, all alone, and armored in slashers: the final girls, the rules, the kill counts, the entire canon from...
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Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Jai is nine, a connoisseur of television cop shows, resident of a basti at the end of the Purple metro line, one of the unnumbered settlements that...
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When You Trap a Tiger
Lily and her older sister Sam move with their mother to live with their grandmother, Halmoni, who is dying of brain cancer, and Lily starts seeing...
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We Are Water Protectors
An Ojibwe girl recalls the teachings her grandmother passed down about water as something sacred, alive, and owed protection, and Carole...
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Paradise
Yusuf is a boy from the small settlement of Kawa when his father, unable to repay a debt, hands him over to Aziz, a wealthy merchant, to work off...
What Shaped 2021
Gurnah's Nobel went to a Tanzanian born novelist living in Britain whose books about displacement and the aftermath of colonialism were largely out of print in America when the call came, and which were reissued within weeks. Clarke had published nothing for sixteen years after Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell owing to chronic illness, and returned with a short strange novel about a man living in an infinite house. Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain traced the Sackler family and the opioid crisis.
Published in 2021, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2021 and took no major award.
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No major prizeKlara and the Sun
Klara is a solar powered Artificial Friend on display in a shop window, waiting for a child to choose her in a near future America where...
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No major prizeProject Hail Mary
Ryland Grace wakes from a medically induced coma aboard a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or why he is there, his only companions two dead...