The 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on the 8th of May, with an unprecedented joint win in the Fiction category.
This year, two books were awarded the Fiction prize: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and Hernan Diaz’s Trust.
Kingsolver’s tenth novel recasts Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, setting the story in the Appalachian mountains. Protagonist Demon deals with child labour, addiction, love, loss, and growing up in a heartbreakingly brilliant tale of a child’s journey to maturity.
Hernan Diaz’s second novel is described as ‘a riveting novel set in a bygone America that explores family, wealth and ambition’. One of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2022, the novel is ‘a complex examination of love and power in a country where capitalism is king.’
For the History category, Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power chronicles the history of Barbour County, Alabama, and the clash of ideals between white supremacists and federal authority. He explores how white people would weaponise freedom in order to continue oppressing and dominating minorities, in a way that will ‘radically shift our understanding of what freedom means in America.’
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, by Beverly Gage, won the Biography category. Named a Best Book of 2022 by the Atlantic and the Washington Post, Gage uses never-before-seen sources to create an in-depth portrayal of the first director of the FBI. She uses Hoover to explain the paths of governance, political culture, race and more over the course of the 20th century.
Writer and academic Hua Hsu’s Stay True took home the Memoir prize, a category only added in 2022. Hsu reflects on friendships and the sudden death of his college roommate in this ‘bracing memoir about growing up’, and has been working on this memoir since his friend passed.
Carl Phillips’ Then The War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 won the prize for Poetry. The collection follows American culture as the country deals with a pandemic, rising racial conflict, and a changing global community.
His Name Is George Floyd, written by Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, won the General Non-Fiction category. This landmark biography ‘reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy’, creating a narrative of Floyd’s life, as well as exploring the global call for change that his death sparked.
A full list of the finalists can be found here. https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2023
Words by Emily Nutbean