John Updike. Edna Ferber. Wallace Stevens. Willa Cather. Robert Caro. Cormac McCarthy. Colson Whitehead (2x), Studs Terkel, Anne Tyler, John Steinbeck.
These immortals are just a double-handful-plus of the Penguin Random House Pulitzer Prize winners across two centuries. They were joined on May 6 by two more honorees, Cristina Rivera Garza and Jayne Anne Phillips, published by our imprints, who were announced as two of the recipients of this year’s annual Prize, which is administered by Columbia University. It is considered the most prestigious in American letters, bestowed for Biography, General Nonfiction, Memoir or Autobiography, History, Poetry, and Fiction.
Our 2024 Winners:
Memoir or Autobiography
Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search For Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth)
Pulitzer citation: “A genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.”
Fiction
Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
Pulitzer citation: “A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.”
Also, the Pulitzer judges cited five of our 2023 publications as runners-up Finalists:
Fiction
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park (Random House)
General Nonfiction
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant (Knopf)
Memoir or Autobiography
The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight, by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press)
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press)
Poetry
Information Desk: An Epic, by Robyn Schiff (Penguin Books)
Penguin Random House-wide cheers for our newest Pulitzer Prize honorees’ editors, publishing teams, and most loudly, our authors. There have been 139 Pulitzer recipients, in the 20th and 21st centuries, from Penguin Random House and its predecessor companies: a proud, humbling achievement unmatched by another book publisher.
Once more said: may our 2024 Pulitzer honorees’ writings also continue to resonate in the years ahead.
