Check Out 2023's Pulitzer Prize-Winning Books
The 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners were just announced recognizing excellence in journalism, books, drama, and music in 22 categories. Unusually, two titles share the fiction prize this year—Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead and Hernan Diaz's Trust which was largely written at The New York Public Library when Diaz was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2020-21. Two other Pulitzer honorees worked on their books during their fellowships at the Cullman Center: Hua Hsu (2019-20) who won for Stay True in the memoir/autobiography category and Jennifer Homans (2016-17) who was a finalist for biography for Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century. Linda Villarosa's Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, a finalist for general nonfiction, was also a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism at NYPL this year.
The winning books are below—click through each title to our catalog to check out or reserve your copy.
Fiction
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver
The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.
Trust
by Hernan Diaz
Told from the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction, this novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception is centered around the mystery of how the Rask family acquired their immense fortune in 1920s-1930’s New York City.
History
Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
by Jefferson Cowie
A prize-winning historian chronicles the long-running clash between white people and federal authority by focusing on Barbour County, Alabama and its history of fighting Reconstruction, integration, and the New Deal.
Biography
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
by Beverly Gage
This major new biography of the man who served for almost 50 years as FBI director looks at the full sweep of his life and career and how he planted the seeds for today’s conservative political landscape.
Memoir or Autobiography
Stay True
by Hua Hsu
In this gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, Hsu recounts his close friendship with Ken, with whom he endured the successes and humiliations of everyday college life until Ken was violently, senselessly taken away from him.
Poetry
Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020
by Carl Phillips
A luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry. Includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures.
General Nonfiction
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa
Two prize-winning Washington Post reporters examine how systemic racism impacted both the life and death of the 46-year-old black man who was murdered in broad daylight outside a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin.
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.