Pulitzer Winners

Publishers Lunch

The Pulitzer Prizes offered a mix of surprises and expected results in their book category winners. Viet Thanh Nguyen's much-heralded debut novel The Sympathizer won for fiction, and in a note on his website the author said: "Of course it’s wonderful for me to get this prize. But within minutes of getting it, I knew that I owed tremendous thanks to everyone who has gone before me in the great, ongoing struggle for social justice, for peace, for genuine equality, for representation for all at every level of every society."

TJ Stiles won in history for the second time (after winning for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, in 2010) and was also a finalist (to William Finnegan's Barbarian Days) in the biography/autobiography category. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates was a finalist in the general nonfiction category, but it was won by Joby Warrick, while the drama category was awarded to Lin-Manuel Miranda for his phenomenon Broadway musical Hamilton.

Grove Atlantic will be going back to press for 40,000 additional copies of The Sympathizer, whose paperback edition was published earlier this month. Knopf has ordered an immediate 2500-copy reprint of TJ Stiles' Custer's Trials, with a further 10,000 copies affixed with a Pulitzer sticker due in on Monday (for a total of 67,500 copies in print.) Doubleday will go back to press for 10,500 copies of Joby Warrick's Black Flags, for a total of 55,000 copies in print. A Penguin Press spokesperson said the imprint "doesn't share print numbers" and declined to specify what additional printings may be in store for Barbarian Days, though they did say the paperback edition's publication date will be moved up to April 26.

The complete winners and finalists across all of the book categories are:

Fiction
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Finalists
Kelly Link, Get in Trouble (Random House)
Margaret Verble, Maud's Line (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

History
TJ Stiles, Custer's Trials (Knopf)

Finalists
Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home (Liveright)
James M. Scott, Target Tokyo (Norton)
Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon's Brain (Little, Brown)

Biography
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days (Penguin Press)

Finalists
TJ Stiles, Custer's Trials (Knopf)
Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World (Grand Central)

Nonfiction
Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of Isis (Doubleday)

Finalists
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau)
Carla Power, If The Oceans Were Ink (Henry Holt)

Poetry
Peter Balakian, Ozone Journal (University of Chicago Press)

Finalists
Elizabeth Willis, Alive: New and Selected Poems (NYRB)
Diane Seuss, Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf)

Drama
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton