{"id":52103,"date":"2024-06-11T06:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-06-11T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=52103"},"modified":"2024-05-18T13:31:37","modified_gmt":"2024-05-18T18:31:37","slug":"2024-pulitzer-prize-winners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/2024-pulitzer-prize-winners\/","title":{"rendered":"2024 Pulitzer Prize Winners"},"content":{"rendered":"

The winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes<\/a> have been announced! You can watch the announcement video<\/a> on the Pulitzer Prize website or read the media release<\/a>. To celebrate the winners, we decided to highlight some of the winners and finalists. Below you will find the fiction winner and finalists, the biography winners, and the general nonfiction winner and finalists.<\/p>\n

Reminder: what is written about below is not the complete list of 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners. For more information about the other 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners as well as past years’ winners, please check out their website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Descriptions are provided by the publishers.<\/p>\n

Fiction<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Winner<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Night Watch<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Jayne Anne Phillips<\/p>\n

In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn\u2019t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital\u2019s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.<\/em><\/p>\n

The omnipresent vagaries of war and race rise to the surface as we learn their story: their flight to the highest mountain ridges of western Virginia; the disappearance of ConaLee\u2019s father, who left for the War and never returned. Meanwhile, in the asylum, they begin to find a new path. ConaLee pretends to be her mother\u2019s maid; Eliza responds slowly to treatment. They get swept up in the life of the facility\u2014the mysterious man they call the Night Watch; the orphan child called Weed; the fearsome woman who runs the kitchen; the remarkable doctor at the head of the institution.<\/em> – Knopf<\/p>\n

This title is also available in large print.<\/p>\n

Finalists:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Same Bed Different Dreams<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Ed Park<\/p>\n

In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan\u2019s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.<\/em><\/p>\n

But what if the KPG still existed\u2014now working toward a unified Korea, secretly pulling levers to further its aims?\u00a0Same Bed Different Dreams\u00a0weaves together three distinct narrative voices with an archive of mysterious images, and twists reality like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Soon Sheen, a former writer now employed by the tech behemoth GLOAT, comes into possession of an unfinished book seemingly authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a riveting revisionist history, connecting famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG\u2019s grand project\u2014everyone from Syngman Rhee and architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London and Marilyn Monroe.\u00a0M*A*S*H is in here, too, as are the Moonies and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Reagan-era downing of a passenger plane that puts the world on the brink of war.<\/em> – Random House<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Wednesday’s Child<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Yiyun Li<\/p>\n

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she\u2019s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of\u00a0Wednesday\u2019s Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces\u2014death, violence, estrangement\u2014come to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in\u00a0The New Yorker,\u00a0Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living\u2014exile, assimilation, loss, love\u2014with Li\u2019s trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.<\/em> – Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n

Biography<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Winners<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>King: A Life<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Jonathan Eig<\/p>\n

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig\u2019s\u00a0King: A Life\u00a0is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.\u2014and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family\u2019s origins as well as MLK\u2019s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists.\u00a0King\u00a0reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father\u2014as well as the nation\u2019s most mourned martyr.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history\u2019s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.<\/em> – Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Ilyon Woo<\/p>\n

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.<\/em><\/p>\n

Along the way, they dodged slave traders, military officers, and even friends of their enslavers, who might have revealed their true identities. The tale of their adventure soon made them celebrities, and generated headlines around the country. Americans could not get enough of this charismatic young couple, who traveled another 1,000 miles criss-crossing New England, drawing thunderous applause as they spoke alongside some of the greatest abolitionist luminaries of the day\u2014among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.<\/em><\/p>\n

But even then, they were not out of danger. With the passage of an infamous new Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, all Americans became accountable for returning refugees like the Crafts to slavery. Then yet another adventure began, as slave hunters came up from Georgia, forcing the Crafts to flee once again\u2014this time from the United States, their lives and thousands more on the line and the stakes never higher.<\/em> – 37 Ink<\/p>\n

General Nonfiction<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Winner<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by Nathan Thrall<\/p>\n

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos\u2014the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad\u2019s fate. It is every parent\u2019s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed\u2019s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.<\/em><\/p>\n

In\u00a0A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,\u00a0Nathan Thrall\u2014hailed for his \u201csevere allergy to conventional wisdom\u201d (Time)\u2014offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel\/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.<\/em> – Metropolitan Books<\/p>\n

Finalists<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our<\/a><\/em> Lives<\/strong> by Siddharth Kara<\/p>\n

Cobalt Red\u00a0is the searing, first-ever expos\u00e9 of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world\u2019s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo\u2014because we are all implicated.<\/em> – St. Martin’s Press<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World<\/a><\/strong><\/em> by John Vaillant<\/p>\n

\n
\n
In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada\u2019s oil industry and America\u2019s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration\u2014the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina\u2014John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.<\/em>Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia,\u00a0shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.<\/em>With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant\u00a0takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America\u2019s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant\u2019s urgent work is a book for\u2014and from\u2014our new century of fire, which has only just begun.<\/em> – Vintage<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced! You can watch the announcement video on the Pulitzer Prize website or read the media release. To celebrate the winners, we decided to highlight some of the winners and finalists. Below you will find the fiction winner and finalists, the[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,13,1],"tags":[8459,442,3252,8461,523,8456,402,8463,8450,8446,8464,8448,3190,8447,8449,3253,8460,8445,676,8429,8455,8462,8430,8457,8458],"class_list":["post-52103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-news-you-can-use","category-reference","tag-a-day-in-the-life-of-abed-salama","tag-biography","tag-books","tag-cobalt-red","tag-drama","tag-ed-park","tag-fiction","tag-fire-weather","tag-ilyon-woo","tag-jayne-anne-phillips","tag-john-vaillant","tag-jonathan-eig","tag-journalism","tag-king","tag-master-slave-husband-wife","tag-music","tag-nathan-thrall","tag-night-watch","tag-nonfiction","tag-pulitzer-prizes","tag-same-bed-different-dreams","tag-siddharth-kara","tag-special-citations","tag-wednesdays-child","tag-yiyun-li"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-dyn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52103"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52206,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52103\/revisions\/52206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}