Our Pulitzer Prize Winners and Finalists

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War — and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds

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Finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Biography

A witty, winning, and revelatory personal narrative of the author’s transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own.

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Finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Biography

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand — and fail to understand — mental illness.

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Finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

An ambitious book-length poem in three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s information desk, where Robyn Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material, and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent forces that inform the museum’s encyclopedic collection and the spiritual powers of art.

Finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction

A stunning account of a colossal wildfire and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, John Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s 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.

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Finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present — loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media.

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