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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction

Finalist: There There, by Tommy Orange (Alfred A. Knopf)

A compassionate debut that, through 12 Native American narrators making their way to a California powwow, offers a chorus of voices struggling with questions of identity and authenticity.

Nominated Work

There There

By

Tommy Orange

Tommy Orange’s shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to each other in ways they may not yet realize. There is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and working to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, who is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death, has come to work at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil has come to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, utterly contemporary and always unforgettable.

-- from the publisher

 

Biography

Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.

Winners

Prize Winner in Fiction in 2019:

Richard Powers

An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them. Fiction

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2019:

Rebecca Makkai

An artful novel that chronicles a mother’s search for her estranged daughter against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, and contemplates the ripples of grief affecting generations of survivors.

The Jury

Elizabeth Taylor(Chair)

Co-Editor, National Book Review; Literary Editor-at-Large, Chicago Tribune

Lawrence Buell

Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

Stephen L. Carter

William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale University

Danielle Trussoni

Novelist and Book Columnist at The New York Times Book Review

Michael Wood

Professor of English, Emeritus, Princeton University

Winners in Fiction

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.
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.
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2019 Prize Winners

See All 2019 Winners