Two Pulitzer Prizes For Penguin Random House
Two authors from Penguin Random House, Jayne Anne Phillips and Cristina Rivera Garza, were awarded a Pulitzer Prize this year. They won in the “Fiction” and “Memoir or Autobiography” categories. Since the Pulitzer Prize was introduced in 1917, a total of 137 Penguin Random House authors have received the famous award.
It is the continuation of a fine tradition that goes back more than 100 years. When this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners were announced at Columbia University in New York on Monday, Penguin Random House authors were once again among the honorees: Jayne Anne Phillips and Cristina Rivera Garza were honored in the “Fiction” and “Memoir or Autobiography” categories. The Pulitzer Prize is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the United States, and is given in the categories of “Fiction,” “History,” “Biography,” “Memoir or Autobiography,” “Poetry,” and “General Nonfiction.”
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to “Night Watch” by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf/Penguin Random House Audio), edited by Ann Close. The story of a mother and daughter who seek refuge in an insane asylum in the chaotic aftermath of the American Civil War, it is also a moving portrait of a family that perseveres against all odds. The judges’ citation reads: “A beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.”
The winner in the “Memoir or Autobiography” category was “Lilianaʼs Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search For Justice” by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth/Penguin Random House Audio), edited by Marie Pantojan. The work sheds light on a wave of feminicides in Mexico, based on the death of one woman. The judges wrote: “A genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.”
In addition to the two winning titles, five other books published by Penguin Random House U.S. were finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes: “Same Bed Different Dreams” by Ed Park (Random House/PRH Audio) in Fiction, “Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World” by John Vaillant (Knopf/PRH Audio) in General Nonfiction, “The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight” by Andrew Leland (Penguin Press/PRH Audio) and “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” by Jonathan Rosen (Penguin Press/PRH Audio) in Memoir or Autobiography, and “Information Desk: An Epic” by Robyn Schiff (Penguin Books/PRH Audio) in Poetry.
The Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Arts, and Letters have been awarded annually since 1917 by the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York - now in 24 categories, six of which are devoted to books. Over the decades, authors published by Penguin Random House have won the prestigious award no fewer than 139 times.
