2015 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced

The Pulitzer Prize is a lot more about journalism than it is about literature, but there are a few categories that are applicable to Attack of the Books! Fiction, History, Biography or Autobiography, Poetry, and General Nonfiction.

Here at Attack of the Books! we’ve actually read and reviewed the 2015 winner in the Fiction category–All the Light We Cannot See–and recommend it wholeheartedly. As for the rest, we’ll have to add them to our “to read” list and hope we can find the time before next year’s prizes are announced.

The Pulitzer Winners (and runners up, just for kicks):

Fiction:

• All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr (Scribner). Read our review here. Runners up included Let Me Be Frank with You, by Richard Ford (Ecco); The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami (Pantheon); and Lovely, Dark, Deep, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco).

History:

• Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, by Elizabeth A. Fenn (Hill and Wang). Runners up were Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert (Alfred A. Knopf); and An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, by Nick Bunker (Alfred A.Knopf).

Biography or Autobiography:

• The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, by David I. Kertzer (Random House). Runners up were Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism, by Thomas Brothers (W.W. Norton); and Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928, by Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Press).

Poetry:

• Digest, by Gregory Pardlo (Four Way Books). Runners up include Reel to Reel, by Alan Shapiro (University of Chicago Press); and Compass Rose, by Arthur Sze (Copper Canyon Press).

General Nonfiction:

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt). Runners up were No Good Men Among the Living, by Anand Gopal (Metropolitan Books); and Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).