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The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction

Finalist: In the Distance, by Hernan Diaz (Coffee House Press)

A gorgeously written novel that charts one man’s growth from boyhood to mythic status as he journeys between continents and the extremes of the human condition.

Nominated Work

In the Distance

By

Hernan Diaz

A YOUNG SWEDISH BOY, SEPARATED FROM HIS BROTHER, BECOMES A MAN; THE MAN, DESPITE HIMSELF, BECOMES A LEGEND AND OUTLAW.

A young Swedish immigrant finds himself penniless and alone in California. The boy travels east in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great current of emigrants pushing west. Driven back again and again, he meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, swindlers, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre, offering a probing look at the stereotypes that populate our past and a portrait of radical foreignness.

-- from the publisher

Biography

Hernan Diaz is the author of "Borges, between History and Eternity" (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.

Winners

Prize Winner in Fiction in 2018:

Andrew Sean Greer

A generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love. Fiction

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2018:

Elif Batuman

A tender, funny portrait, devoid of sentimentality, of a young woman during a disorienting and pivotal year in college, where she learns the intricacies of language and love.

The Jury

Nancy Pearl(Chair)

Author and retired librarian

Leah Hager Cohen

Barrett Professor of Creative Writing

Elizabeth McCracken

James A. Michener Chair in Creative Writing

Winners in Fiction

2017

Colson Whitehead

For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.
2016

Viet Thanh Nguyen

A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a "man of two minds" -- and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.
2015

Anthony Doerr

An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
2014

Donna Tartt

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.
See All Fiction

2018 Prize Winners

Investigative Reporting

Staff of The Washington Post

For purposeful and relentless reporting that changed the course of a Senate race in Alabama by revealing a candidate’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and subsequent efforts to undermine the journalism that exposed it.
See All 2018 Winners