The 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced this week, and among the book categories, a familiar name in fiction once again has figured prominently.
Colson Whitehead, who won the Pulitzer in 2017 for The Underground Railroad, this year has taken the fiction prize for The Nickel Boys (Doubleday), the story of a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee and unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory.
The 2020 Pulitzer Prize Board presented awards in 15 journalism categories and seven arts and letters categories. This year’s recipients constitute the 104th class of Pulitzer Prize winners. The yearlong process began with the appointment of 113 jurors who make three recommendations in each of 22 categories, of which books constitute five.
Since 1984, the winners have celebrated their achievement at a luncheon where the President of Columbia University presents their awards. With this year’s pandemic delaying and changing official procedures, Pulitzer Prize Administrator Dana Canedy announced the winners from her home.
Here are the 2020 Pulitzer Prize book winners:
FICTION
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead | Doubleday
A black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, finding himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between the boy’s ideals and his friend’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children.
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HISTORY
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel | Oxford University Press
The unforgettable saga of one enslaved woman’s fight for justice — and reparations. An epic tale of a black woman who survived slavery twice and who achieved more than merely a moral victory over one of her oppressors. Sweet Taste of Liberty is a portrait of an extraordinary individual as well as a searing reminder of the lessons of her story, which establish beyond question the connections between slavery and the prison system that rose in its place.
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BIOGRAPHY
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser | Ecco
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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POETRY
The Tradition by Jericho Brown | Copper Canyon Press
A work that questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither — or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its most innovative.
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GENERAL NONFICTION
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer | Farrar, Straus and Giroux
A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying is a twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival.
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The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin | Metropolitan Books
Acclaimed historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier throughout the full sweep of U.S. history — from the American Revolution to the War of 1898, the New Deal to the election of 2016. For centuries, he shows, America’s constant expansion served as a “gate of escape,” helping to deflect domestic political and economic conflicts outward. But this deflection meant that the country’s problems, from racism to inequality, were never confronted directly, bringing political passions that had long been directed elsewhere back home.
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