Winners Announced for Pulitzer Prizes and More

Literary award winners announced in the last week include the recipients of the 2017 Pulitzer Prizes and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Literature Awards. Shortlists were also announced for Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize, the U.K.’s Rathbones Folio Prize, and Ireland’s International Dublin Literary Award.

 And the winners are…

2017 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners across all book categories are as follows:

• Fiction: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
• General nonfiction: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (Crown)
• History: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon)
• Biography or autobiography: The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar (Random House)
• Poetry: Olio by Tyehimba Jess (Wave Books)
• Drama: Sweat by Lynn Nottage

The winner in each category will receive $10,000.

2017 American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Awards in Literature Winners

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the 19 writers who will receive the organization’s 2017 awards in literature. The prizes, totaling $265,000, honor established and emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. This year’s winners, nominated by the Academy’s 250 members and selected by a rotating committee of writers, are as follows:

• Eight Arts and Letters Awards in Literature ($10,000 each to honor exceptional accomplishment in any genre): Ayad Akhtar, Chris Bachelder, Paul Beatty, Kathleen Graber, Jennifer Haigh, Dominique Morisseau, Richard Sieburth, and Luis Alberto Urrea
• Benjamin H. Danks Award ($20,000 given triennially to an exceptional young writer): Jamaal May
• Blake-Dodd Prize ($25,000 given triennially to a nonfiction writer): Elizabeth Kolbert
• E.M. Forster Award ($20,000 to a young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States): Robert Macfarlane
• Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction ($5000 for a work of first fiction [novel or short stories] published in 2016): Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson (Knopf)
• Award of Merit Medal ($25,000 to an outstanding playwright): Lynn Nottage
• Addison M. Metcalf Award ($10,000 to a young writer of fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry): Safiya Sinclair
• Arthur Rense Poetry Prize ($20,000 given triennially to an exceptional poet): August Kleinzahler
• Rosenthal Family Foundation Award ($10,000 to a young writer of considerable literary talent for a work published in 2016): The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan (Viking)
• John Updike Award ($20,000 given biennially to a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence): Dana Spiotta
• Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award ($20,000 to a writer whose work merits recognition for the quality of its prose style): Joan Acocella
• E. B. White Award ($10,000 to a writer for achievement in children’s literature): Judy Blume

The awards will be presented in New York City at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May. Work by the winners will be featured in an exhibition in the Academy’s galleries from May 18 to June 11.

2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist

The International and Canadian shortlist for this year’s Griffin Poetry Prize, administered by The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, is as follows:

International Shortlist

• World of Made and Unmade by Jane Mead (Alice James Books)
• In Praise of Defeat by Donald Nicholson-Smith, translated from the French, written by Abdellatif Laâbi (Archipelago Books)
• Falling Awake by Alice Oswald (Jonathan Cape/W.W. Norton & Company)
• Say Something Back by Denise Riley (Picador)

 Canadian Shortlist

• Injun by Jordan Abel (Talonbooks)
• Violet Energy Ingots by Hoa Nguyen (Wave Books) 
• Silvija by Sandra Ridley (BookThug)

This year, publishers submitted 617 books of poetry from 39 countries, including 23 translations. As in prior years, House of Anansi Press has published an anthology of poems from the shortlisted books; royalties will be donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day.

The finalists will read at Koerner Hall at The Royal Conservatory in Toronto on Wednesday, June 7, and each will be awarded $10,000. The winners, to be announced at the Griffin Poetry Prize Awards on Thursday, June 8, will be awarded $65,000.

Booksellers are invited to promote the shortlisted books with book stickers. To order your stickers free of charge, contact [email protected]. Stickers for the winning books will be available after June 8.

Rathbones Folio Prize Shortlist

Eight titles have been named to the 2017 shortlist for the U.K.’s Rathbones Folio Prize, the first major English language book prize to celebrate the best literature of the time, regardless of form.

This year’s shortlist is as follows:

• The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming (Scribner/Chatto & Windus)
• The Return by Hisham Matar (Random House/Viking)
• This Census-Taker by China Miéville (Del Rey/Picador)
• The Sport of Kings by CE Morgan (Picador/4th Estate)
• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf/Melville House)
• Golden Hill by Francis Spufford (Scribner/Faber & Faber)
• Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien (Norton/Granta)
• Burning Country by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami (Pluto Press)

All books considered for the prize are nominated by the Folio Academy, an international group of esteemed writers and critics. The winner will be named on May 24 at a ceremony at the British Library in London.

2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award Shortlist

The shortlist has been announced for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary award for a single work of fiction published in English. This year’s titles were nominated by public libraries in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, and the U.S.

The 2017 shortlist is as follows:

• A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa (Angolan), translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Harvill Secker)
• Confession of the Lioness by Mia Couto (Mozambican), translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• The Green Road by Anne Enright (Irish) (W.W. Norton)
• The Prophets of Eternal Fjord by Kim Leine (Danish/Norwegian), translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Liveright)
• The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (Mexican), translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)
• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese/American) (Grove Press)
• Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta (Nigerian-American) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk (Turkish), translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap (Knopf)
• A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler (Austrian), translated from the German by Charlotte Collins (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (American) (Doubleday)

The International DUBLIN Literary Award is sponsored by the Dublin City Council and managed by the city’s libraries. The winner, who will receive 100,000 Euros in prize money, will be announced by Dublin’s Lord Mayor, Brendan Carr, on June 21.