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The 2019 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 Overstory, by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)

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.

Richard Powers accepts the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

The Overstory

By

Richard Powers

National Book Award winner Richard Powers’s twelfth novel is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

-- from the publisher

Biography

Richard Powers is the author of twelve novels, most recently The Overstory. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a Pulitzer Prize and four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

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.

Tommy Orange

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.

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