Pulitzer Prizes 2024: A Guide to the Winning Books and Finalists

Eighteen books were recognized as winners or finalists for the Pulitzer Prize on Monday, in the categories of history, memoir, poetry, general nonfiction, fiction and biography, which had two winners.

FICTION

Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips

A story about a mother and daughter set in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, W.Va., after the Civil War. “Night Watch,” which was also longlisted for the National Book Award, is about surviving war and its aftermath. “I consider Phillips to be among the greatest and most intuitive of American writers,” wrote our critic Dwight Garner.

Knopf

Wednesday’s Child: Stories, by Yiyun Li

A short story collection written over the course of a decade that examines aging and loss. The stories touch on a woman who makes a spreadsheet of every person she’s lost, a middle-aged practitioner of Eastern medicine and an 88-year-old biologist.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Same Bed Different Dreams, by Ed Park

An imagined alternate history of Korea that includes assassins, slasher films and the dangers of social media. In a review in The Times, the critic Hamilton Cain called the book “wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands?”

Random House

HISTORY

No Right to an Honest Living, by Jacqueline Jones

Jones, a historian and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, examines the hypocrisy of Boston before the Civil War. The city was known for its antislavery rhetoric and as the center of abolitionism, but Black residents endured “casual cruelty” in the work force and were condemned to lives of poverty without the chance for equal employment.

Basic Books