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The Winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes Have Been Announced

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Jeff O'Neal is the executive editor of Book Riot and Panels. He also co-hosts The Book Riot Podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @thejeffoneal.

The 108th Pulitzer Prizes were announced mere minutes ago, and the headline for me is a bit of a surprise in the (for the purposes of this reader) main attraction: the fiction winner.

Here is the full list of winners in the book categories, with the official citations:

Fiction

Book cover of Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

Winner

Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)

Citation: “A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.”

Finalists

Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li

Biography (Two winners!)

Book covers of Master Slave Husband Wife and King: A Life

Winners

King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Citation: A revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination.

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)

Citation: “A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.”

Finalist

Larry McMurtry: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin’s Press)

Memoir or Autobiography

Book cover of Liliana's Invincible Summer

Winner

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth)

Citation: “A genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.”

Finalists

The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press)

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press)

Poetry

Book cover of Tripas: Poems

Winner

Tripas: Poems, by Brandon Som (Georgia Review Books)

Citation: “A collection that deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict.”

Finalists

Information Desk: An Epic, by Robyn Schiff (Penguin Books)

To 2040, by Jorie Graham (Copper Canyon Press)

General Nonfiction

Book cover of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Winner

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books)

Citation: “A finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations.”

Finalists

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, by Siddharth Kara (St. Martin’s Press)

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant (Knopf)


The full announcement list of all winners is here.