The Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday, as Colson Whitehead won the fiction prize for his much celebrated novel The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award and was clearly the consensus “book of the year.” Similarly, Matthew Desmond, a winner of National Book Critics Circle Award this year, took the general nonfiction award for his widely praised Evicted; while Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, an NBA nominee, won for history. The complete winners and finalists across all of the book categories are:
Fiction
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday)
Finalists
Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown)
C. E. Morgan, The Sport of Kings (FSG)
History
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water (Pantheon)
Finalists
Larrie D. Ferreiro, Brothers at Arms (Knopf)
Wendy Warren, New England Bound (Liveright)
Biography
Hisham Matar, The Return (Random House)
Finalists
Susan Faludi , In the Darkroom (Metropolitan Books)
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Random House)
Nonfiction
Matthew Desmond, Evicted (Crown)
Finalists
John Donvan and Caren Zucker, In a Different Key (Crown)
Micki McElya, The Politics of Mourning (Harvard University Press)
Poetry
Tyehimba Jess, Olio (Wave Books)
Finalists
Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems: 1950-2012 (Norton)
Campbell McGrath, XX (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Drama
Lynn Nottage, Sweat
Finalists
Taylor Mac, A 24-Decade History of Popular Music
Sarah DeLappe, The Wolves