Donna Tartt Wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch

Posted on April 14, 2014

The Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, Donna Tartt has won the Fiction prize for her coming of age novel, The Goldfinch which is published by Little, Brown. The Fiction Jury consisted of Art Winslow, former literary and executive editor, The Nation and past president, National Book Critics Circle (Chair), Ron Charles, deputy editor, The Washington Post Book World and Sabina Murray, writer and professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The award, which is given for "distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life," carries a prize of $10,000. The jury described the book as, "a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy's entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction, a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart." The other finalists were The Son by Philipp Meyer (Ecco), and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis (Atlantic Monthly Press).

The other prize winners in the Letters, Drama and Music category are:

• Drama - "The Flick" by Annie Baker
• History - The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 by Alan Taylor (W.W. Norton)
• Biography - Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Poetry - 3 Sections by Vijay Seshadri (Graywolf Press)
• General Nonfiction - Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin (Bantam Books)
• Music - "Become Ocean" by John Luther Adams (Taiga Press/Theodore Front Musical Literature)

You can see all the winners here.