2024 Book Award Winners
Percival Everett won the National Book Award for James, his retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved man Jim. Samantha Harvey won the Booker for Orbital, Jayne Anne Phillips took the Pulitzer for Night Watch, and Han Kang became the first Korean writer and the first Asian woman to receive 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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Night Watch
In 1874 a woman and her twelve year old daughter arrive at the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, delivered there by the...
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Orbital
Six people are aboard the International Space Station for one day. Four astronauts and two cosmonauts, from countries that are not on good terms,...
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James
Everett retells Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the man Twain called Jim, and the first thing he changes is the voice. In...
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Brotherless Night
Sashi is sixteen in Jaffna in 1981, and her ambition is simple and enormous: medical school, like her adored eldest brother. The novel gives her...
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Nathan Thrall builds the book around a single event, a school bus carrying kindergarteners that crashed and burned on a highway outside Jerusalem...
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No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era
Jacqueline Jones recovers the working lives of Boston's free Black residents in the years before, during and after the Civil War, setting that...
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King: A Life
Jonathan Eig follows Martin Luther King Jr. from his birth in Atlanta in January 1929, into a Morehouse College education finished at nineteen, and...
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Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
Ilyon Woo follows Ellen and William Craft from slavery in Macon, Georgia, into the escape they planned together over Christmas 1848, one of the...
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Soldiers and Kings
Soldiers and Kings is a rare book length ethnography of the people who move migrants for money, and it takes readers where no journalist embed had...
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Question 7
The title comes from a Chekhov schoolbook problem that dissolves into absurdity, and Flanagan's book is built the same way: a question, roughly,...
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A City on Mars
The Weinersmiths began this book as space settlement enthusiasts, intending a cheerful guide to humanity's multiplanetary future, and their...
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Tripas: Poems
Tripas listens for the overlapping rhythms of Brandon Som's Mexican and Chinese family histories, set against the labor and language of the...
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Fierce Elegy
Fierce Elegy is the distillation of Peter Gizzi's lifelong subject, which is what the lyric poem can do with loss, and its title is an honest...
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Some Desperate Glory
Kyr has spent her whole life on Gaea Station, a military rock crewed by the last few thousand humans. She is the best cadet of her generation, bred...
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who lives in the ruins under a hill, sleeps through winters, eats the occasional monster hunter, and builds...
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The Haunting of Velkwood
Twenty years ago, every soul on one suburban block, Velkwood Street, turned to ghosts in a single night, the dead going on with their routines...
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Flags on the Bayou
Louisiana, autumn 1863: the Mississippi is Union, New Orleans and Baton Rouge occupied, the Confederacy west of the river a rotting apparatus of...
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The Eyes and the Impossible
Johannes is a dog who runs free through a park beside the sea, so fast that the humans who visit the park barely register him as he passes, and he...
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Big
A young Black girl starts out entirely comfortable in her own body, until the day she gets stuck in a playground swing built for someone smaller...
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The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye is an unremarkable Seoul homemaker who does part time graphic work, by her husband Mr Cheong's own flat, unsentimental account, until a...
What Shaped 2024
Orbital is one of the shortest books ever to win the Booker, a single day aboard the International Space Station with almost no plot, and it sold in numbers nobody expected. Han Kang's Nobel, for work including The Vegetarian and Human Acts, brought Korean literature a readership that translation had been slowly building for a decade. Everett's James retells a canonical American novel by giving its silenced character the intelligence and the voice he always had.
Published in 2024, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2024 and took no major award.
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No major prizeIntermezzo
Peter and Ivan Koubek are brothers a decade apart, a barrister in his thirties and a competitive chess player barely out of his teens, thrown into...
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No major prizeThe Ministry of Time
An unnamed civil servant of mixed British and Cambodian heritage takes a strange new government job as a bridge, tasked with acclimating a person...