2023 Book Award Winners
The Pulitzer for Fiction was shared between Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and Hernan Diaz's Trust. Kingsolver also took the Women's Prize, Paul Lynch won the Booker for Prophet Song, Justin Torres won the National Book Award for Blackouts, and Jon Fosse received the Nobel.
20 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Demon Copperhead
Damon Fields, called Demon for his red hair, is born on the floor of a single wide trailer in Lee County, Virginia, to a teenage mother who does...
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Trust
Trust is four documents that disagree about the same marriage. The first is a novel called Bonds, published in 1937, about a financier of uncanny...
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Prophet Song
It opens with a knock at the door. Two men from the newly formed secret police want to speak to Eilish Stack's husband, a trade union official. He...
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Blackouts
A young man the dying call Nene arrives at the Palace, a crumbling refuge somewhere in the desert, to sit the deathwatch of Juan Gay, an old queer...
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Demon Copperhead
Damon Fields, called Demon for his red hair, is born on the floor of a single wide trailer in Lee County, Virginia, to a teenage mother who does...
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His Name Is George Floyd
Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa set out to write a full biography of a man most of the world knew only from the final minutes of his life,...
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Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
Jefferson Cowie tells nearly two centuries of American history through one place, Barbour County, Alabama, tracing how its white residents...
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G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Beverly Gage follows J. Edgar Hoover from his start in the Justice Department in 1917, heading the Alien Enemy Bureau during the First World War,...
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The Rediscovery of America
The Rediscovery of America is a retelling of five centuries of American history with Native nations restored to the center, and its argument is...
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Fire Weather
In May 2016 a wildfire walked into Fort McMurray, Alberta, the boomtown capital of the tar sands, and made ninety thousand people run for their...
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An Immense World
Every animal lives inside its own sensory bubble, perceiving the slice of reality its equipment reveals and nothing else, a concept, the Umwelt,...
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Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020
Then the War gathers more than a decade of Carl Phillips's work, drawing selected poems together into a single retrospective volume that lets a...
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Self-Portrait as Othello
Self-Portrait as Othello takes Shakespeare's Moor of Venice out of the play and wears him: Jason Allen-Paisant uses Othello as mask, mirror, and...
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Nettle & Bone
Marra is the third daughter of a small kingdom that survives because a larger neighbour wants its harbour. Her eldest sister was married to the...
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The Saint of Bright Doors
Fetter was raised by his mother to kill his father. She removed his shadow at birth, trained him in the disciplines of assassination, and taught...
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The Reformatory
Gracetown, Florida, 1950. Robbie Stephens Jr is twelve when he kicks a white teenager for insulting his sister Gloria, and the county's machinery...
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Notes on an Execution
Ansel Packer dies on schedule, and the novel opens twelve hours before, inside his countdown: the death row breakfast, the manifesto he believes...
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Freewater
Twelve year old Homer and his younger sister Ada flee an enslaved life on the Southerland plantation, jumping into a river to escape the men...
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Hot Dog
A red dachshund lives with its owner in a cramped New York City apartment, and on one brutally hot day the two of them head out into the city...
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Septology
An aging painter named Asle lives alone on the western coast of Norway with his dog, largely cut off from other people, working on an unfinished...
What Shaped 2023
Demon Copperhead moves David Copperfield to Appalachia during the opioid epidemic and won both the Pulitzer and the Women's Prize, a double no other novel has managed. Lynch's Prophet Song imagines Ireland sliding into authoritarianism and was written partly in response to Syria. Fosse's Nobel went to a Norwegian playwright and novelist whose long, repetitive, unpunctuated sentences are unlike anything else being honoured. Generative artificial intelligence arrived in publishing that year and the arguments about it began immediately.
Published in 2023, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2023 and took no major award.
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No major prizeThe Bee Sting
The Barnes family used to own the biggest car dealership in their small Irish town. After the crash of 2008 the business is failing, and the family...
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No major prizeYellowface
June Hayward is a struggling novelist watching her successful, more talented friend Athena Liu choke to death on a pancake during a night of...