The history Pulitzer went to The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed, which explores the generations of a slave family and casts new light on the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson. In more recent years the honours have gone to Cormac McCarthy for The Road, Annie Proulx for The Shipping News and, last year, Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Previous winners of the fiction Pulitzer, which was first awarded in 1948, include Harper Lee, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Schutt's novel was "fiercely honest, carefully observed and subtly rendered", said judges, while Erdrich's was "haunting". Strout, previously a finalist for the Orange prize and for the PEN/Faulkner award, beat an all-female line-up of finalists to take the Pulitzer, seeing off competition from Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves, which explores racial tensions between Native Americans and whites in North Dakota, and Christine Schutt's All Souls, in which a student at an all girls' Manhattan prep school battles a rare form of cancer. Judges for the $10,000 (£6,800) prize, awarded to a work of distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, said that Strout's work "packs a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating".
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |