It’s here, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners!

Known as one of the most prestigious and coveted literary awards in the United States, The Pulitzer Prize recognizes achievements in journalism, literature and musical composition.

The Pulitzer Prize was first established in 1917 by provisions in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, and is administered by Columbia University in New York. Prizes are awarded yearly in varying categories including several for literature.

So, if you love a good award-winner, you’ll definitely want to check out this year’s list, several of which are available in eBook or audiobook form on OverDrive.

Fiction Winners and Runners-Up

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead eBook | Audiobook In this follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times best-seller The Underground Railroad, Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers. Read more great works by Whitehead on OverDrive/Libby.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett eBook | Audiobook Patchett, New York Times best-selling author of Commonwealth, delivers her most powerful novel to date with a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. Read more great works by Patchett on OverDrive/Libby.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner eBook | Audiobook From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, comes The Topeka School – a tale of family, adolescence, transgression and the conditions that have given rise to the New Right. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is a riveting pre-history of the present including the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men. Read more great works by Ben Lerner on OverDrive/Libby.

General Nonfiction Runner Up

Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life by Louise Aronson For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture and her own life to weave a vision of old age that’s neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy—a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage and hope about aging, medicine and humanity itself.

Other Winners

Here are the remaining 2020 Pulitzer Prize winners and runners-up in literature:

Biography Winner and Runners-Up

• Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser
• Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer
• Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir And Me by the late Deirdre Bair

General Nonfiction Winners and Runner-Up

• The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin
• The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer and Care by Anne Boyer
• Solitary: Unbroken by Four Decades in Solitary Confinement by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George

History Winner and Runners-Up

• Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel
• Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
• The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin

Poetry Winner and Runners-Up

• The Tradition by Jericho Brown
• Dunce by Mary Ruefle
• Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems by Dorianne Laux

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!