Adam Johnson’s North Korea Novel Takes the Pulitzer Prize

A year after declining to present the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the jurors went ahead and named a winner this year. Perhaps nudged by the North Korea’s mad, headline-grabbing sabre-rattling, the award has gone to Adam Johnson’s novel of the hermit kingdom, The Orphan Master’s Son. Nathan Englander and Eowyn Ivey were the other fiction finalists.

Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:

Fiction:

• Winner: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson – (excerpt)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Englander’s Year in Reading, excerpt)
• The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

General Nonfiction:

• Winner: Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (The Millions Interview)
• The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell (excerpt)

History:

• Winner: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (excerpt)
• The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn (excerpt)
• Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History by John Fabian Witt (excerpt)

Biography:

• Winner: The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss (excerpt)
• Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra (excerpt)
• The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw (excerpt)

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.