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‘Night Watch,’ ‘King: A Life,’ among 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners
Here are the books that were named winners and finalists in the categories of fiction, history, biography, memoir, poetry and general nonfiction.
“Night Watch,” by Jayne Anne Phillips, has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” by Nathan Thrall won the award for general nonfiction.
Village Voice critic Greg Tate was awarded a posthumous special citation for his innovative music and literary criticism on Black culture. His essay collection “Flyboy in the Buttermilk” (1992) and its sequel, “Flyboy 2” (2016), have been profound influences on generations of cultural critics. After Tate died at 64, in 2021, journalist and jazz writer Adam Shatz wrote in a tweet that Tate was “to avant-Black music what Clement Greenberg was to Abstract Expressionism, a pioneering critic, canon-builder, curator, astronaut-explorer of planets unknown to most of his peers.”
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This is the final year that eligibility for the literary and arts prizes was restricted to U.S. citizens. The Pulitzer Prize board announced in September that, starting with the 2025 awards cycle, it would broaden eligibility to permanent residents and “those who have made the United States their longtime primary home.” Previously, authors of any nationality could win the history prize for a book on U.S. history; now, consistent with the updated rule, entries in that category “must be written by U.S. authors.”
Here’s a full list of the 2024 winners and finalists in all of the categories:
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Fiction: “Night Watch” by Jayne Anne Phillips
The author’s sixth novel continues an interest that began with her debut, “Machine Dreams”: how war scars both civilians and combatants. This one takes place in her home state of West Virginia, where 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother, Eliza, struggle to survive the brutal, chaotic aftermath of the Civil War.
“Phillips’s artistic conscience won’t let her flinch from this truth,” that good and bad people often suffer equally, wrote Wendy Smith in her Post review, “but her generous heart won’t let it be the last word.”
Finalists:
- “Wednesday’s Child” by Yiyun Li
- “Same Bed Different Dreams” by Ed Park
General Nonfiction: “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy” by Nathan Thrall
Thrall’s book grew out of a 2021 article he wrote for the New York Review of Books. The book follows Salama, a Palestinian man living in the occupied territories of the West Bank, on the long, Kafkaesque path he had to take to learn the fate of his 5-year-old son after a bus accident. The tragedy becomes a lens through which Thrall, a journalist, explores other systemic issues involving the Israeli government and Palestinian life, such as the separation wall and permit system that forced the school bus to detour, the slow response of emergency services, and the ID card system that prevented Salama from searching Jerusalem hospitals for his child.
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The book was published just days before the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, and as Israel invaded Gaza, a quarter of Thrall’s scheduled book talks and appearances this past fall were called off.
Reached by phone at the bar in Berlin where he was celebrating after learning the Pulitzer news, Thrall said, You know, the truly ironic thing about all of this is that Josh [Yaffa, a writer for the New Yorker] and I are doing an event around the book tomorrow in Frankfurt – and that Frankfurt event was canceled. We had to scramble just in the last few days to find another venue for it because of the insane atmosphere in Germany about anything mildly critical of Israel.”
Finalists:
- “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” by John Vaillant
- “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives” by Siddarth Kara
Memoir or Autobiography: “Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice” by Cristina Rivera Garza
In “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” Cristina Rivera Garza investigates the murder of her sister in Mexico City, which at the time was considered a “crime of passion” rather than “femicide” or “intimate partner violence.”
Garza “may never find what she is seeking, but writing about the process is a kind of conjuring of the sister she lost. An artful catharsis,” wrote Erika L. Sanchez in her review for The Post. “Her words come together in a book that is not so much plot-driven but rather a very careful excavation.”
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Finalists:
“The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight” by Andrew Leland
“The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” by Jonathan Rosen
History: “No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era” by Jacqueline Jones
Jacqueline Jones, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been a Pulitzer finalist twice before, for her work on the history of race and the roles of Black women. Her new book takes its title from an 1860 speech given by doctor John S. Rock, criticizing White Bostonians for their “studied indifference” to the plight of their Black neighbors even as they criticized the South.
Finalists:
- “Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion” by Elliott West
- “American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century” by Michael Willrich
Biography: “King: A Life” by Jonathan Eig and “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom” by Ilyon Woo
“King,” widely regarded as the definitive biography of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., made headlines last year when Eig shared his archival discovery that King’s harshest criticism of Malcolm X appeared to have been fabricated. In his Post review calling it “the most compelling account of King’s life in a generation,” Mark Whitaker noted that the book “deals only briskly with the complex and evolving rivalry” between the two activists, though he praised its nuanced portrait of Coretta Scott King.
“Master Slave Husband Wife” follows a couple’s escape, in 1848, from the slave state of Georgia to Pennsylvania. The wife, Ellen Craft, personated a wealthy White enslaver; her husband, William, played the role of her enslaved attendant. “I’ve been continually inspired by each of the choices the Crafts make,” author Ilyon Woo told NPR. “It starts, of course, with their journey and pursuing their own freedom. The way in which they continually challenge themselves – for me, that’s been an ongoing inspiration.”
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Finalist:
- “Larry McMurtry: A Life” by Tracy Daugherty
Poetry: “Tripas: Poems” by Brandon Som
“Tripas” draws on the experiences of Som’s Chicana grandmother and Chinese grandfather to explore ideas of family history, language and other inherited practices. “American family elegy has rarely found such multilayered wordplay,” wrote critic Stephanie Burt in the London Review of Books.
Finalists:
- “To 2040” by Jorie Graham
- “Information Desk: An Epic” by Robyn Schiff
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