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The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction
For distinguished fiction published during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, by Joshua Cohen (New York Review Books)

A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot.

Joshua Cohen accepts the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

By

Joshua Cohen

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021

A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021

Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

Biography

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in New York City.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Fiction in 2022:

Francisco Goldman

An autofictional inquiry into the protean nature of identity, written with disarming candor and grace, blending memory and imagination to transformational effect.

Gayl Jones

An engrossing epic set in 17th-century Brazil that is at once a fugitive slave’s odyssey, a love story, and an investigation into the meaning of freedom that is vaster and stranger than the sum of its parts.

The Jury

Courtney Hodell(Chair)

Director of Writers’ Programs, The Whiting Foundation

Chris Abani

Board of Trustees Professor of English, Northwestern University

Tom Beer

Editor-in-Chief, Kirkus Reviews

Deborah Heard

Former Executive Director, Hurston/Wright Foundation

Sam Sacks

Fiction Columnist, The Wall Street Journal

Winners in Fiction

2021

Louise Erdrich

A majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.
2020

Colson Whitehead

A spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.
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.
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.
See All Fiction

2022 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic

For an unflinching portrait of a family’s reckoning with loss in the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the author's personal connection to the story with sensitive reporting that reveals the long reach of grief.
See All 2022 Winners