The ninety-third-annual Pulitzer Prizes were announced earlier this afternoon at Columbia University in New York City. The winner in poetry is W. S. Merwin for his twenty-sixth poetry collection, The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press), and the winner in fiction is Elizabeth Strout for her third book, the story collection Olive Kitteridge (Random House). They will each receive ten thousand dollars.
The finalists in poetry were Frank Bidart for Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Ruth Stone for What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press). The jurors were poets Anne Winters, Carl Dennis, and James Baker Hall.
The finalists in fiction were Louise Erdrich for her novel The Plague of Doves (HarperCollins) and Christine Schutt for her novel All Souls (Harcourt). The jurors were editor Susan Larson, professor R. H. W. Dillard, and author Nancy Pearl.
Below is a list of the other twenty-first-century Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. And if you have some extra time, consider clicking around the new and improved Pulitzer Prize Web site. There are good images and text about past winners in poetry and fiction, but if you really want to be blown away, haunted even, check out the photo galleries of the various photography categories, especially Feature Photography and the work of Preston Gannaway (2008) and Renée C. Byer (2007), in particular. (Click on the "Works" tab.)
2008 Poetry: Robert Hass for Time and Materials (Ecco) and Philip Schultz for Failure (Harcourt)
2008 Fiction: Junot Díaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead Books)
2007 Poetry: Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin)
2007 Fiction: Cormac McCarthy for The Road (Knopf)
2006 Poetry: Claudia Emerson for Late Wife (Lousiana State University Press)
2006 Fiction: Geraldine Brooks for March (Viking)
2005 Poetry: Ted Kooser for Delights & Shadows (Copper Cayon Press)
2005 Fiction:
Marilynne Robinson
for Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2004 Poetry:
Franz Wright for Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf)
2004 Fiction: Edward P. Jones for The Known World (Amistad)
2003 Poetry: Paul Muldoon for Moy Sand and Gravel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2003 Fiction:
Jeffrey Eugenides for Middlesex (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2002 Poetry:
Carl Dennis for Practical Gods (Penguin)
2002 Fiction:
Richard Russo for Empire Falls (Knopf)
2001 Poetry:
Stephen Dunn for Different Hours (Norton)
2001 Fiction:
Michael Chabon for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House)
2000 Poetry:
C.K. Williams for Repair (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2000 Fiction:
Jhumpa Lahiri for Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books)