Here Are the 2022 Pulitzer Prize Book Winners

The announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes is a rite of spring, rich with both pageantry and gravitas, as we celebrate the previous year’s outstanding achievements in journalism, music, criticism, cartooning, and books. The five categories of fiction, poetry, history, biography, and general nonfiction shine a beam onto the scholarship and creativity that enrich us and define our humanity. Often decades in the making, these works educate, augment, and entertain, as only the written word can.

This year’s winners offer vital perspectives at a moment of grueling transition and potentially grave consequences. One painter’s account of his life, conveyed not only in words but also in his canvases, evokes a rural corner of Georgia where the cruelties of Jim Crow were tempered by a vibrant, resilient Black community. Two historians examine the contradictions of American politics through the lenses of Indigenous justice and our fraught relationship with Cuba. An inventive, searing novel traces one family’s shadow across the Jewish experience, while a superb nonfiction narrative captures the hopes and despairs of a neglected Brooklyn girl. And who says a poet can’t teach a strict form like the sonnet fresh tricks?

The United States has struggled through a year like no other, our lives an endless scroll of breaking news and boldface headlines. Not since the 1960s—and possibly the Civil War—has our republic seemed so fragile and ill-equipped to wrangle the challenges ahead, from Covid to climate change to international conflict to human rights at home. But one thing’s for sure: Books—such as those honored by the Pulitzer Prizes—are our best tools to make sense of it all.