2022 Book Award Winners
Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer for The Netanyahus and Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Tess Gunty took the National Book Award for The Rabbit Hutch, and Annie Ernaux 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 Netanyahus
In the winter of 1959, Ruben Blum is the only Jewish member of the history faculty at a small college in upstate New York. He is a historian of...
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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Maali Almeida wakes up dead. He is a war photographer, a gambler and a closeted gay man in Colombo in 1990, and he cannot remember who killed him,...
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The Rabbit Hutch
Vacca Vale, Indiana, is a city the twentieth century used up and left: the Zorn Automobile works that built it are closed hulks, the valley the...
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The Book of Form and Emptiness
A year after Benny Oh's father is killed in an alley behind their house, the boy starts hearing things. Not voices in the ordinary sense: the...
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Invisible Child
Andrea Elliott followed a girl named Dasani Coates for eight years, beginning when Dasani was eleven and living with her parents and seven siblings...
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Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
Nicole Eustace builds Covered with Night around a single killing on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1722, when fur traders John and Edmund Cartlidge...
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Cuba: An American History
Ada Ferrer traces more than five centuries of Cuban history, from Christopher Columbus's 1492 arrival through Spanish colonization, the sugar...
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Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South
This is Winfred Rembert's own account of his life, told to the philosopher Erin Kelly and published the same year he died, and it follows him from...
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South to America
South to America is Imani Perry's journey through the American South conducted on a thesis: that the South is not the nation's exception, the...
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Super-Infinite
John Donne wrote the most electric love poems in English, and also the sermons that gave the language for whom the bell tolls and no man is an...
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A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth
The whole history of life, 4.6 billion years in twelve chapters and around three hundred small pages, and the compression is the art: Gee, a Nature...
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frank: sonnets
frank: sonnets tracks Diane Seuss's life from rural Michigan through the New York punk scene, the AIDS crisis, motherhood, and addiction, told...
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Sonnets for Albert
Sonnets for Albert is a son's book about an absent father, written after the father's death, when absence becomes permanent and therefore finally...
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A Desolation Called Peace
An alien fleet is sitting at the edge of Teixcalaanli space, destroying ships and refusing to communicate in anything a human recognises as...
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Babel, or the Necessity of Violence
A boy is taken from cholera stricken Canton in 1829 by an English professor, renamed Robin Swift, drilled in Latin, Greek and Mandarin, and...
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The Devil Takes You Home
Mario's daughter is four when the leukemia is diagnosed, and the novel's opening movement is the American nightmare played straight: the job lost,...
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Five Decembers
Late November 1941: Joe McGrady is a Honolulu PD detective with a war record he does not discuss and a girl named Molly he means to marry, assigned...
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The Last Cuentista
In the year 2061, twelve year old Petra Peña boards a colony ship bound for a distant planet called Sagan as a comet closes in on Earth, carrying...
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Watercress
A young Chinese American girl is mortified when her parents pull the car over on a rural Ohio road to gather wild watercress growing in a roadside...
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The Years
The Years covers Annie Ernaux's own life from 1941 to 2006, and it is built on a single formal choice that governs everything else in the book:...
What Shaped 2022
In August 2022 Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New York, more than thirty years after the fatwa, and lost the sight in one eye. Ernaux's Nobel honoured a French writer who has spent a career turning her own life into a kind of collective document, refusing the distinction between memoir and sociology. Karunatilaka's novel is narrated by a dead photographer in the Sri Lankan civil war. Russia invaded Ukraine in February and the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
Published in 2022, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2022 and took no major award.
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No major prizeLessons in Chemistry
Elizabeth Zott is a research chemist in early 1960s Southern California, and the problem, as everyone around her keeps explaining, is that she is a...
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No major prizeTomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a Los Angeles hospital in the late 1980s, he recovering from the reconstructive foot surgeries that...