Pulitzer Judges Refuse to Award Prize for Fiction

Posted on April 16, 2012

Talk about your snubs. The 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today, but no one is talking about the winners. All anyone is talking about is the fact that the judges refused to award a prize for Fiction. This is the first time that's happened since 1977.

Judges Susan Larson, Maureen Corrigan, and Michael Cunningham sat on the fiction jury and apparently were unimpressed with the three finalists: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Knopf), and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown).

So who actually managed to win a Pulitzer Prize this year? The winners included:

History: Malcolm X: A Life in Reinvention by Manning Marable (Viking)
Biography: George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis (The Penguin Press)
Poetry: Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith (Graywolf Press)
General Nonfiction: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton)

You can see the full list of winners here.

4-17-12 Update: The jury members have spoken out and denied that they refused to pick a winner. They picked three worthy titles to shortlist, then sent them to the Pulitzer Board, who refused to pick a winner after no one book got a majority of 18 votes. The jury members have expressed outrage at this turn of events.