Richard Powers Wins the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

In a starred review, Kirkus called the book “a magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.”

Here’s a sampling of this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists, with bonus links where available.

Fiction:

• Winner: The Overstory by Richard Powers (This book was the subject of two essays on the site.)
• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Read our interview with Makkai here.)
• There There by Tommy Orange (Read his Year in Reading.)

Drama:

• Winner: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury (Drury is mentioned, briefly, in Donald Quist’s Year in Reading.)
• Dance Nation by Clare Barron
• What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck

History:

• Winner: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
• American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson
• Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Biography:

• Winner: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Nonfiction.)
• Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Caroline Weber
• The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

Poetry:

• Winner: Be With by Forrest Gander (Mentioned in Ada Limón’s Year in Reading.)
• feeld by Jos Charles (An August 2018 Must-Read.)
• Like by A.E. Stallings (A September 2018 Must-Read.)

General Nonfiction:

• Winner: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold
• In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers by Bernice Yeung
• Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer website.

The post Richard Powers Wins the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction appeared first on The Millions.