Award Winners

2023
Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020
Author: Carl Phillips

2022
frank: sonnets
Author: Diane Seuss

2021
Postcolonial Love Poem
Author: Natalie Diaz

2020
The Tradition
Author: Jericho Brown

2019
Be With
Author: Forrest Gander

2018
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
Author: Frank Bidart

2017
Olio
Author: Tyehimba Jess

2016
Ozone Journal
Author: Peter Balakian

2015
Digest
Author: Gregory Pardlo

2014
3 Sections
Author: Vijay Seshadri

2013
Stag’s Leap
Author: Sharon Olds

2012
Life on Mars
Author: Tracy K. Smith

2011
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
Author: Kay Ryan

2010
Versed
Author: Rae Armantrout

2009
The Shadow of Sirius
Author: W.S. Merwin

2008
Failure
Author: Philip Schultz

Time and Materials
Author: Robert Hass

2007
Native Guard
Author: Natasha Trethewey

2006
Late Wife
Author: Claudia Emerson

2005
Delights & Shadows
Author: Ted Kooser

2004
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard
Author: Franz Wright

2003
Moy Sand and Gravel
Author: Paul Muldoon

2002
Practical Gods
Author: Carl Dennis

2001
Different Hours
Author: Stephen Dunn

2000
Repair
Author: C.K. Williams

1999
Blizzard of One
Author: Mark Strand

1998
Black Zodiac
Author: Charles Wright

1997
Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
Author: Lisel Mueller

1996
The Dream of the Unified Field
Author: Jorie Graham

1995
The Simple Truth
Author: Philip Levine

1994
Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems
Author: Yusef Komunyakaa

1993
The Wild Iris
Author: Louise Glück

1992
Selected Poems
Author: James Tate

1991
Near Changes
Author: Mona Van Duyn

1990
The World Doesn’t End
Author: Charles Simic

1989
New and Collected Poems
Author: Richard Wilbur

1988
Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems
Author: William Meredith

1987
Thomas and Beulah
Author: Rita Dove

1986
The Flying Change
Author: Henry Taylor

1985
Yin
Author: Carolyn Kizer

1984
American Primitive
Author: Mary Oliver

1983
Selected Poems
Author: Galway Kinnell

1982
The Collected Poems
Author: Sylvia Plath

1981
The Morning of the Poem
Author: James Schuyler

1980
Selected Poems
Author: Donald Justice

1979
Now and Then
Author: Robert Penn Warren

1978
Collected Poems
Author: Howard Nemerov

1977
Divine Comedies
Author: James Merrill

1976
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
Author: John Ashbery

1975
Turtle Island
Author: Gary Snyder

1974
The Dolphin
Author: Robert Lowell

1973
Up Country
Author: Maxine Kumin

1972
Collected Poems
Author: James Wright

1971
The Carrier of Ladders
Author: William S. Merwin

1970
Untitled Subjects
Author: Richard Howard

1969
Of Being Numerous
Author: George Oppen

1968
The Hard Hours
Author: Anthony Hecht

1967
Live or Die
Author: Anne Sexton

1966
Selected Poems
Author: Richard Eberhart

1965
77 Dream Songs
Author: John Berryman

1964
At The End Of The Open Road
Author: Louis Simpson

1963
Pictures from Brueghel
Author: William Carlos Williams

1962
Poems
Author: Alan Dugan

1961
Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades
Author: Phyllis McGinley

1960
Heart’s Needle
Author: W. D. Snodgrass

1959
Selected Poems 1928-1958
Author: Stanley Kunitz

1958
Promises: Poems 1954-1956
Author: Robert Penn Warren

1957
Things of This World
Author: Richard Wilbur

1956
Poems: North & South – A Cold Spring
Author: Elizabeth Bishop

1955
Collected Poems
Author: Wallace Stevens

1954
The Waking
Author: Theodore Roethke

1953
Collected Poems 1917-1952
Author: Archibald MacLeish

1952
Collected Poems
Author: Marianne Moore

1951
Complete Poems
Author: Carl Sandburg

1950
Annie Allen
Author: Gwendolyn Brooks

1949
Terror and Decorum
Author: Peter Viereck

1948
The Age of Anxiety
Author: W. H. Auden

1947
Lord Weary’s Castle
Author: Robert Lowell

1945
V-Letter and Other Poems
Author: Karl Shapiro

1944
Western Star
Author: Stephen Vincent Benet

1943
A Witness Tree
Author: Robert Frost

1942
The Dust Which Is God
Author: William Rose Benet

1941
Sunderland Capture
Author: Leonard Bacon

1940
Collected Poems
Author: Mark Van Doren

1939
Selected Poems
Author: John Gould Fletcher

1938
Cold Morning Sky
Author: Marya Zaturenska

1937
A Further Range
Author: Robert Frost

1936
Strange Holiness
Author: Robert P. Tristram Coffin

1935
Bright Ambush
Author: Audrey Wurdemann

1934
Collected Verse
Author: Robert Hillyer

1933
Conquistador
Author: Archibald Macleish

1932
The Flowering Stone
Author: George Dillon

1931
Collected Poems
Author: Robert Frost

1930
Selected Poems
Author: Conrad Aiken

1929
John Browns Body
Author: Stephen Vincent Benet

1928
Tristram
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

1927
Fiddler’s Farewell
Author: Leonora Speyer

1926
What’s O’Clock
Author: Amy Lowell

1925
The Man Who Died Twice
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

1924
New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
Author: Robert Frost

1923
The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver: A Few Figs from Thistles: Eight Sonnets in American Poetry, 1922. A Miscellany
Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay

1922
Collected Poems
Author: Edwin Arlington Robinson

1919
Corn Huskers
Author: Carl Sandburg

Old Road to Paradise
Author: Margaret Widdemer

1918
Love Songs
Author: Sara Teasdale

2023
Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
Author: Jefferson Cowie

2022
Covered with Night
Author: Nicole Eustace

Cuba: An American History
Author: Ada Ferrer

2021
Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America
Author: Marcia Chatelain

2020
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America
Author: W. Caleb McDaniel

2019
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Author: David W. Blight

2018
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
Author: Jack E. Davis

2017
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
Author: Heather Ann Thompson

2016
Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
Author: T.J. Stiles

2015
Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People
Author: Elizabeth A. Fenn

2014
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
Author: Alan Taylor

2013
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam
Author: Fredrik Logevall

2012
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
Author: Manning Marable

2011
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
Author: Eric Foner

2010
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
Author: Liaquat Ahamed

2009
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Author: Annette Gordon-Reed

2008
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
Author: Daniel Walker Howe

2007
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Author: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

2006
Polio: An American Story
Author: David M. Oshinsky

2005
Washington’s Crossing
Author: David Hackett Fischer

2004
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Author: Steven Hahn

2003
An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943
Author: Rick Atkinson

2002
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Author: Louis Menand

2001
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Author: Joseph J. Ellis

2000
Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
Author: David M. Kennedy

1999
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
Author: Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

1998
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion
Author: Edward J. Larson

1997
Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
Author: Jack N. Rakove

1996
William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
Author: Alan Taylor

1995
No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin

1993
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Author: Gordon S. Wood

1992
The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
Author: Mark E. Neely

1991
A Midwife’s Tale
Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

1990
In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines
Author: Stanley Karnow

1989
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
Author: James M. McPherson

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963
Author: Taylor Branch

1988
The Launching of Modern American Science 1846-1876
Author: Robert V. Bruce

1987
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
Author: Bernard Bailyn

1986
…the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age
Author: Walter A. McDougall

1985
Prophets of Regulation
Author: Thomas K. McCraw

1983
The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790
Author: Rhys L. Isaac

1982
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
Author: C. Vann Woodward

1981
American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876
Author: Lawrence A. Cremin

1980
Been in the Storm So Long
Author: Leon F. Litwack

1979
The Dred Scott Case
Author: Don E. Fehrenbacher

1978
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
Author: Alfred D. Chandler

1977
The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861
Author: David M. Potter

1976
Lamy of Santa Fe
Author: Paul Horgan

1975
Jefferson and His Time, Vols. I-V
Author: Dumas Malone

1974
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
Author: Daniel J. Boorstin

1973
People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization
Author: Michael Kammen

1972
Neither Black Nor White
Author: Carl N. Degler

1971
Roosevelt: The Soldier Of Freedom
Author: James MacGregor Burns

1970
Present At The Creation: My Years In The State Department
Author: Dean Acheson

1969
Origins of the Fifth Amendment
Author: Leonard W. Levy

1968
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Author: Bernard Bailyn

1967
Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West
Author: William H. Goetzmann

1966
The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War
Author: Perry Miller

1965
The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879
Author: Irwin Unger

1964
Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town
Author: Sumner Chilton Powell

1963
Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878
Author: Constance McLaughlin Green

1962
The Triumphant Empire: Thunder-Clouds Gather in the West 1763-1766
Author: Lawrence H. Gipson

1961
Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference
Author: Herbert Feis

1960
In the Days of McKinley
Author: Margaret Leech

1959
The Republican Era: l869-1901
Author: Leonard D. White

1958
Banks and Politics in America
Author: Bray Hammond

1957
Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-192O
Author: George F. Kennan

1956
The Age of Reform
Author: Richard Hofstadter

1955
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History
Author: Paul Horgan

1954
A Stillness at Appomattox
Author: Bruce Catton

1953
The Era of Good Feelings
Author: George Dangerfield

1952
The Uprooted
Author: Oscar Handlin

1951
The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period 1815-1840
Author: R. Carlyle Buley

1950
Art and Life in America
Author: Oliver W. Larkin

1949
The Disruption of American Democracy
Author: Roy Franklin Nichols

1948
Across the Wide Missouri
Author: Bernard Devoto

1947
Scientists Against Time
Author: James Phinney Baxter 3rd

1946
The Age of Jackson
Author: Arthur Meier Schlesinger

1945
Unfinished Business
Author: Stephen Bonsal

1944
The Growth of American Thought
Author: Merle Curti

1943
Paul Revere and the World He Lived In
Author: Esther Forbes

1942
Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865
Author: Margaret Leech

1941
The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860
Author: Marcus Lee Hansen

1940
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Author: Carl Sandburg

1939
A History of American Magazines
Author: Frank Luther Mott

1938
The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900
Author: Paul Herman Buck

1937
The Flowering of New England 1815-1865
Author: Van Wyck Brooks

1936
A Constitutional History of the United States
Author: Andrew C. McLaughlin

1935
The Colonial Period of American History
Author: Charles McLean Andrews

1934
The People’s Choice
Author: Herbert Agar

1933
The Significance of Sections in American History
Author: Frederick J. Turner

1932
My Experiences in the World War
Author: John J. Pershing

1931
The Coming of the War 1914
Author: Bernadotte E. Schmitt

1930
The Founding of the American Republic, Volume II: The War of Independence: American Phase
Author: Claude H. Van Tyne

1929
The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865
Author: Fred Albert Shannon

1928
Main Currents in American Thought, 2 vols.
Author: Vernon Louis Parrington

1927
Pinckney’s Treaty
Author: Samuel Flagg Bemis

1926
A History of the United States, Vol. VI: The War for Southern Independence, 1849-1865
Author: Edward Channing

1925
History of the American Frontier
Author: Frederic L. Paxson

1924
The American Revolution — A Constitutional Interpretation
Author: Charles Howard McIlwain

1923
The Supreme Court in United States History
Author: Charles Warren

1922
The Founding of New England
Author: James Truslow Adams

1921
The Victory at Sea
Author: William Sowden Sims in collaboration with Burton J. Hendrick

1920
The War with Mexico
Author: Justin H. Smith

1918
History of the Civil War, 1861-1865
Author: James Ford Rhodes

1917
With Americans of Past and Present Days
Author: His Excellency J.J. Jusserand

2023
English
Author: Sanaz Toossi

2022
Fat Ham
Author: James Ijames

2021
The Hot Wing King
Author: Katori Hall

2020
A Strange Loop
Author: Michael R. Jackson

2019
Fairview
Author: Jackie Sibblies Drury

2018
Cost of Living
Author: Martyna Majok

2017
Sweat
Author: Lynn Nottage

2016
Hamilton
Author: Lin-Manuel Miranda

2015
Between Riverside and Crazy
Author: Stephen Adly Guirgis

2014
The Flick
Author: Annie Baker

2013
Disgraced
Author: Ayad Akhtar

2012
Water by the Spoonful
Author: Quiara Alegría Hudes

2011
Clybourne Park
Author: Bruce Norris

2010
Next to Normal
Author: Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey

2009
Ruined
Author: Lynn Nottage

2008
August: Osage County
Author: Tracy Letts

2007
Rabbit Hole
Author: David Lindsay-Abaire

2006
No award given

2005
Doubt, a parable
Author: John Patrick Shanley

2004
I Am My Own Wife
Author: Doug Wright

2003
Anna in the Tropics
Author: Nilo Cruz

2002
Topdog/Underdog
Author: Suzan-Lori Parks

2001
Proof
Author: David Auburn

2000
Dinner With Friends
Author: Donald Margulies

1999
Wit
Author: Margaret Edson

1998
How I Learned to Drive
Author: Paula Vogel

1997
No award given

1996
Rent
Author: Jonathan Larson

1995
The Young Man From Atlanta
Author: Horton Foote

1994
Three Tall Women
Author: Edward Albee

1993
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Author: Tony Kushner

1992
The Kentucky Cycle
Author: Robert Schenkkan

1991
Lost in Yonkers
Author: Neil Simon

1990
The Piano Lesson
Author: August Wilson

1989
The Heidi Chronicles
Author: Wendy Wasserstein

1988
Driving Miss Daisy
Author: Alfred Uhry

1987
Fences
Author: August Wilson

1985
Sunday in the Park With George
Author: Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

1984
Glengarry Glen Ross
Author: David Mamet

1983
Night, Mother
Author: Marsha Norman

1982
A Soldier’s Play
Author: Charles Fuller

1981
Crimes of the Heart
Author: Beth Henley

1980
Talley’s Folly
Author: Lanford Wilson

1979
Buried Child
Author: Sam Shepard

1978
The Gin Game
Author: Donald L. Coburn

1977
The Shadow Box
Author: Michael Cristofer

1976
A Chorus Line
Author: Michael Bennett, James Kirkwood, Jr., Marvin Hamlisch, Nicholas Dante and Edward Kleban

1975
Seascape
Author: Edward Albee

1973
That Championship Season
Author: Jason Miller

1971
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds
Author: Paul Zindel

1970
No Place To Be Somebody
Author: Charles Gordone

1969
The Great White Hope
Author: Howard Sackler

1967
A Delicate Balance
Author: Edward Albee

1965
The Subject Was Roses
Author: Frank D. Gilroy

1962
How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying
Author: Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows

1961
All The Way Home
Author: Tad Mosel

1960
Fiorello!
Author: Jerome Weidman, George Abbott, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick

1959
J. B.
Author: Archibald Macleish

1958
Look Homeward, Angel
Author: Ketti Frings

1957
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Author: Eugene O’Neill

1956
Diary of Anne Frank
Author: Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich

1955
Cat on A Hot Tin Roof
Author: Tennessee Williams

1954
The Teahouse of the August Moon
Author: John Patrick

1953
Picnic
Author: William Inge

1952
The Shrike
Author: Joseph Kramm

1950
South Pacific
Author: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan

1949
Death of a Salesman
Author: Arthur Miller

1948
A Streetcar Named Desire
Author: Tennessee Williams

1946
State of the Union
Author: Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay

1945
Harvey
Author: Mary Chase

1943
The Skin of Our Teeth
Author: Thornton Wilder

1941
There Shall Be No Night
Author: Robert E. Sherwood

1940
The Time of Your Life
Author: William Saroyan

1939
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
Author: Robert E. Sherwood

1938
Our Town
Author: Thornton Wilder

1937
You Can’t Take It With You
Author: Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

1936
Idiots Delight
Author: Robert E. Sherwood

1935
The Old Maid
Author: Zoe Akins

1934
Men in White
Author: Sidney Kingsley

1933
Both Your Houses
Author: Maxwell Anderson

1932
Of Thee I Sing
Author: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin

1931
Alison’s House
Author: Susan Glaspell

1930
The Green Pastures
Author: Marc Connelly

1929
Street Scene
Author: Elmer L. Rice

1928
Strange Interlude
Author: Eugene O’Neill

1927
In Abraham’s Bosom
Author: Paul Green

1926
Craig’s Wife
Author: George Kelly

1925
They Knew What They Wanted
Author: Sidney Howard

1924
Hell-Bent Fer Heaven
Author: Hatcher Hughes

1923
Icebound
Author: Owen Davis

1922
Anna Christie
Author: Eugene O’Neill

1921
Miss Lulu Bett
Author: Zona Gale

1920
Beyond the Horizon
Author: Eugene O’Neill

1918
Why Marry?
Author: Jesse Lynch Williams

2023
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
Author: Beverly Gage

2022
Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South
Author: the late Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly

2021
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Author: the late Les Payne and Tamara Payne

2020
Sontag: Her Life and Work
Author: Benjamin Moser

2019
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Author: Jeffrey C. Stewart

2018
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Author: Caroline Fraser

2017
The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
Author: Hisham Matar

2016
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Author: William Finnegan

2015
The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
Author: David I. Kertzer

2014
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
Author: Megan Marshall

2013
The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Author: Tom Reiss

2012
George F. Kennan: An American Life
Author: John Lewis Gaddis

2011
Washington : A Life
Author: Ron Chernow

2010
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Author: T.J. Stiles

2009
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
Author: Jon Meacham

2008
Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
Author: John Matteson

2007
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Author: Debby Applegate

2006
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Author: Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin

2005
de Kooning: An American Master
Author: Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

2004
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
Author: William Taubman

2003
Master of the Senate
Author: Robert A. Caro

2002
John Adams
Author: David McCullough

2001
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963
Author: David Levering Lewis

2000
Vera
Author: Stacy Schiff

1999
Lindbergh
Author: A. Scott Berg

1998
Personal History
Author: Katharine Graham

1997
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
Author: Frank McCourt

1996
God: A Biography
Author: Jack Miles

1995
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
Author: Joan D. Hedrick

1994
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919
Author: David Levering Lewis

1993
Truman
Author: David McCullough

1992
Fortunate Son: The Healing of a Vietnam Vet
Author: Lewis B. Puller

1991
Jackson Pollock
Author: Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

1990
Machiavelli in Hell
Author: Sebastian de Grazia

1989
Oscar Wilde
Author: Richard Ellmann

1988
Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
Author: David Herbert Donald

1987
Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Author: David J. Garrow

1986
Louise Bogan: A Portrait
Author: Elizabeth Frank

1985
The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
Author: Kenneth Silverman

1984
Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915
Author: Louis R. Harlan

1983
Growing Up
Author: Russell Baker

1982
Grant: A Biography
Author: William McFeely

1981
Peter the Great: His Life and World
Author: Robert K. Massie

1980
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Author: Edmund Morris

1979
Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews
Author: Leonard Baker

1978
Samuel Johnson
Author: Walter Jackson Bate

1977
A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T. E. Lawrence
Author: John E. Mack

1976
Edith Wharton: A Biography
Author: R. W. B. Lewis

1975
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Author: Robert Caro

1974
O’Neill, Son and Artist
Author: Louis Sheaffer

1973
Luce and His Empire
Author: W. A. Swanberg

1972
Eleanor and Franklin
Author: Joseph P. Lash

1971
Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915 -1938
Author: Lawrance Thompson

1970
Huey Long
Author: T. Harry Williams

1969
The Man From New York: John Quinn and His Friends
Author: Benjamin Lawrence Reid

1968
Memoirs
Author: George F. Kennan

1967
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
Author: Justin Kaplan

1966
A Thousand Days
Author: Arthur M. Schlesinger

1965
Henry Adams
Author: Ernest Samuels

1964
John Keats
Author: Walter Jackson Bate

1963
Henry James
Author: Leon Edel

1961
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
Author: David Donald

1960
John Paul Jones
Author: Samuel Eliot Morison

1959
Woodrow Wilson
Author: Arthur Walworth

1958
George Washington, Volumes I-VII
Author: Douglas Southall Freeman with John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth

1957
Profiles in Courage
Author: John F. Kennedy

1956
Benjamin Henry Latrobe
Author: Talbot Faulkner Hamlin

1955
The Taft Story
Author: William S. White

1954
The Spirit of St. Louis
Author: Charles A. Lindbergh

1953
Edmund Pendleton 1721-1803
Author: David J. Mays

1952
Charles Evans Hughes
Author: Merlo J. Pusey

1951
John C. Calhoun: American Portrait
Author: Margaret Louise Coit

1950
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
Author: Samuel Flagg Bemis

1949
Roosevelt and Hopkins
Author: Robert E. Sherwood

1948
Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow
Author: Margaret Clapp

1947
The Autobiography of William Allen White
Author: William Allen White

1946
Son of the Wilderness
Author: Linnie Marsh Wolfe

1945
George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel
Author: Russell Blaine Nye

1944
The American Leonardo: The Life of Samuel F B. Morse
Author: Carleton Mabee

1943
Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus
Author: Samuel Eliot Morison

1942
Crusader in Crinoline
Author: Forrest Wilson

1941
Jonathan Edwards, 1703–1758: A Biography
Author: Ola Elizabeth Winslow

1940
Woodrow Wilson, Life and Letters. Vols. VII and VIII
Author: Ray Stannard Baker

1939
Benjamin Franklin
Author: Carl Van Doren

1938
Pedlar’s Progress
Author: Odell Shepard

The Life of Andrew Jackson
Author: Marquis James

1937
Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration
Author: Allan Nevins

1936
The Thought and Character of William James
Author: Ralph Barton Perry

1935
R. E. Lee
Author: Douglas S. Freeman

1934
John Hay
Author: Tyler Dennett

1933
Grover Cleveland
Author: Allan Nevins

1932
Theodore Roosevelt
Author: Henry F. Pringle

1931
Charles W. Eliot
Author: Henry James

1930
The Raven
Author: Marquis James

1929
The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
Author: Burton J. Hendrick

1928
The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas
Author: Charles Edward Russell

1927
Whitman: An Interpretation in Narrative
Author: Emory Holloway

1926
The Life of Sir William Osler, 2 vols.
Author: Harvey Cushing

1925
Barrett Wendell and His Letters
Author: M. A. Dewolfe Howe

1924
From Immigrant to Inventor
Author: Michael Idvorsky Pupin

1923
The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page
Author: Burton J. Hendrick

1922
A Daughter of the Middle Border
Author: Hamlin Garland

1921
The Americanization of Edward Bok
Author: Edward Bok

1920
The Life of John Marshall
Author: Albert J. Beveridge

1919
The Education of Henry Adams
Author: Henry Adams

1918
Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed
Author: William Cabell Bruce

1917
Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910
Author: Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott assisted by Florence Howe Hall

2023
Demon Copperhead
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

Trust
Author: Hernan Diaz

2022
The Netanyahus
Author: Joshua Cohen

2021
The Night Watchman
Author: Louise Erdrich

2020
The Nickel Boys
Author: Colson Whitehead

2019
The Overstory
Author: Richard Powers

2018
Less
Author: Andrew Sean Greer

2017
The Underground Railroad
Author: Colson Whitehead

2016
The Sympathizer
Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen

2015
All the Light We Cannot See
Author: Anthony Doerr

2014
The Goldfinch
Author: Donna Tartt

2013
The Orphan Master’s Son
Author: Adam Johnson

2012
No award given

2011
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Author: Jennifer Egan

2010
Tinkers
Author: Paul Harding

2009
Olive Kitteridge
Author: Elizabeth Strout

2008
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Diaz

2007
The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy

2006
March
Author: Geraldine Brooks

2005
Gilead
Author: Marilynne Robinson

2004
The Known World
Author: Edward P. Jones

2003
Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

2002
Empire Falls
Author: Richard Russo

2001
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Author: Michael Chabon

2000
Interpreter of Maladies
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

1999
The Hours
Author: Michael Cunningham

1998
American Pastoral
Author: Philip Roth

1997
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
Author: Steven Millhauser

1996
Independence Day
Author: Richard Ford

1995
The Stone Diaries
Author: Carol Shields

1994
The Shipping News
Author: E. Annie Proulx

1993
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Author: Robert Olen Butler

1992
A Thousand Acres
Author: Jane Smiley

1991
Rabbit At Rest
Author: John Updike

1990
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Author: Oscar Hijuelos

1989
Breathing Lessons
Author: Anne Tyler

1988
Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison

1987
A Summons to Memphis
Author: Peter Taylor

1986
Lonesome Dove
Author: Larry McMurtry

1985
Foreign Affairs
Author: Alison Lurie

1984
Ironweed
Author: William Kennedy

1983
The Color Purple
Author: Alice Walker

1982
Rabbit Is Rich
Author: John Updike

1981
A Confederacy of Dunces
Author: John Kennedy Toole

1980
The Executioner’s Song
Author: Norman Mailer

1979
The Stories of John Cheever
Author: John Cheever

1978
Elbow Room
Author: James Alan McPherson

1976
Humboldt’s Gift
Author: Saul Bellow

1975
The Killer Angels
Author: Michael Shaara

1973
The Optimist’s Daughter
Author: Eudora Welty

1972
Angle of Repose
Author: Wallace Stegner

1970
Collected Stories
Author: Jean Stafford

1969
House Made of Dawn
Author: N. Scott Momaday

1968
The Confessions of Nat Turner
Author: William Styron

1967
The Fixer
Author: Bernard Malamud

1966
Collected Stories
Author: Katherine Anne Porter

1965
The Keepers Of The House
Author: Shirley Ann Grau

1964
No award given

1963
The Reivers
Author: William Faulkner

1962
The Edge of Sadness
Author: Edwin O’Connor

1961
To Kill A Mockingbird
Author: Harper Lee

1960
Advise and Consent
Author: Allen Drury

1959
The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters
Author: Robert Lewis Taylor

1958
A Death In The Family
Author: James Agee

1956
Andersonville
Author: MacKinlay Kantor

1955
A Fable
Author: William Faulkner

1953
The Old Man and the Sea
Author: Ernest Hemingway

1952
The Caine Mutiny
Author: Herman Wouk

1951
The Town
Author: Conrad Richter

1950
The Way West
Author: A. B. Guthrie

1949
Guard of Honor
Author: James Gould Cozzens

1948
Tales of the South Pacific
Author: James A. Michener

NOTE: Prior to 1948, The Pulitzer Committee granted the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.

1947
All the King’s Men
Author: Robert Penn Warren

1945
A Bell for Adano
Author: John Hersey

1944
Journey in the Dark
Author: Martin Flavin

1943
Dragon’s Teeth
Author: Upton Sinclair

1942
In This Our Life
Author: Ellen Glasgow

1940
The Grapes of Wrath
Author: John Steinbeck

1939
The Yearling
Author: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

1938
The Late George Apley
Author: John Phillips Marquand

1937
Gone With the Wind
Author: Margaret Mitchell

1936
Honey in the Horn
Author: Harold L. Davis

1935
Now in November
Author: Josephine Winslow Johnson

1934
Lamb in His Bosom
Author: Caroline Miller

1933
The Store
Author: T. S. Stribling

1932
The Good Earth
Author: Pearl S. Buck

1931
Years of Grace
Author: Margaret Ayer Barnes

1930
Laughing Boy
Author: Oliver La Farge

1929
Scarlet Sister Mary
Author: Julia Peterkin

1928
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Author: Thornton Wilder

1927
Early Autumn
Author: Louis Bromfield

1926
Arrowsmith
Author: Sinclair Lewis

1925
So Big
Author: Edna Ferber

1924
The Able McLaughlins
Author: Margaret Wilson

1923
One of Ours
Author: Willa Cather

1922
Alice Adams
Author: Booth Tarkington

1921
The Age of Innocence
Author: Edith Wharton

1919
The Magnificent Ambersons
Author: Booth Tarkington

1918
His Family
Author: Ernest Poole

2023
His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice
Author: Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

2022
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
Author: Andrea Elliott

2021
Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy
Author: David Zucchino

2020
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
Author: Greg Grandin

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
Author: Anne Boyer

2019
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America
Author: Eliza Griswold

2018
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
Author: James Forman Jr.

2017
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Author: Matthew Desmond

2016
Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
Author: Joby Warrick

2015
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Author: Elizabeth Kolbert

2014
Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation
Author: Dan Fagin

2013
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Author: Gilbert King

2012
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Author: Stephen Greenblatt

2011
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

2010
The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
Author: David E. Hoffman

2009
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Author: Douglas A. Blackmon

2008
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945
Author: Saul Friedländer

2007
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Author: Lawrence Wright

2006
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
Author: Caroline Elkins

2005
Ghost Wars
Author: Steve Coll

2004
Gulag: A History
Author: Anne Applebaum

2003
“A Problem From Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide
Author: Samantha Power

2002
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
Author: Diane McWhorter

2001
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Author: Herbert P. Bix

2000
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Author: John W. Dower

1999
Annals of the Former World
Author: John McPhee

1998
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Author: Jared Diamond

1997
Ashes To Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, The Public Health, And The Unabashed Triumph Of Philip Morris
Author: Richard Kluger

1996
The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism
Author: Tina Rosenberg

1995
The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time
Author: Jonathan Weiner

1994
Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days Of The Soviet Empire
Author: David Remnick

1993
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America
Author: Garry Wills

1992
The Prize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power
Author: Daniel Yergin

1991
The Ants
Author: Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson

1990
And Their Children After Them
Author: Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson

1989
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam
Author: Neil Sheehan

1988
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Author: Richard Rhodes

1987
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land
Author: David K. Shipler

1986
Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families
Author: J. Anthony Lukas

Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White
Author: Joseph Lelyveld

1985
The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two
Author: Studs Terkel

1984
The Social Transformation Of American Medicine
Author: Paul Starr

1983
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Author: Susan Sheehan

1982
The Soul of a New Machine
Author: Tracy Kidder

1981
Fin-De Siecle Vienna: Politics And Culture
Author: Carl E. Schorske

1980
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter

1979
On Human Nature
Author: Edward O. Wilson

1978
The Dragons of Eden
Author: Carl Sagan

1977
Beautiful Swimmers
Author: William W. Warner

1976
Why Survive? Being Old In America
Author: Robert N. Butler

1975
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Author: Annie Dillard

1974
The Denial of Death
Author: Ernest Becker

1973
Children of Crisis, Vols. II and III
Author: Robert Coles

Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
Author: Frances FitzGerald

1972
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945
Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

1971
The Rising Sun
Author: John Toland

1970
Gandhi’s Truth
Author: Erik H. Erikson

1969
So Human An Animal
Author: Rene Jules Dubos

The Armies Of The Night
Author: Norman Mailer

1968
The Story of Civilization: Rousseau and Revolution
Author: Will and Ariel Durant

1967
The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
Author: David Brion Davis

1966
Wandering Through Winter
Author: Edwin Way Teale

1965
O Strange New World
Author: Howard Mumford Jones

1964
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Author: Richard Hofstadter

1963
The Guns of August
Author: Barbara W. Tuchman

1962
The Making of the President 1960
Author: Theodore H. White

2023 – John Fosse
“for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”

2022 – Annie Ernaux
“for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”

2021 – Abdulrazak Gurnah
“for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”

2020 – Louise Glück
“for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”

2019 – Peter Handke
“for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”

2018 – Olga Tokarczuk
“for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”

2017 – Kazuo Ishiguro
“who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”

2016 – Bob Dylan
“for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”

2015 – Svetlana Alexievich
“for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”

2014 – Patrick Modiano
“for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation”

2013 – Alice Munro
“master of the contemporary short story”

2012 – Mo Yan
“who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”

2011 – Tomas Tranströmer
“because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality”

2010 – Mario Vargas Llosa
“for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”

2009 – Herta Müller
“who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”

2008 – Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
“author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”

2007 – Doris Lessing
“that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”

2006 – Orhan Pamuk
“who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures”

2005 – Harold Pinter
“who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms”

2004 – Elfriede Jelinek
“for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”

2003 – John Maxwell Coetzee
“who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider”

2002 – Imre Kertész
“for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history”

2001 – Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul
“for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories”

2000 – Gao Xingjian
“for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chinese novel and drama”

1999 – Günter Grass
“whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history”

1998 – José Saramago
“who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality”

1997 – Dario Fo
“who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”

1996 – Wisława Szymborska
“for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”

1995 – Seamus Heaney
“for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past”

1994 – Kenzaburō Ōe
“who with poetic force creates an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today”

1993 – Toni Morrison
“who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”

1992 – Derek Walcott
“for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”

1991 – Nadine Gordimer
“who through her magnificent epic writing has – in the words of Alfred Nobel – been of very great benefit to humanity”

1990 – Octavio Paz
“for impassioned writing with wide horizons, characterized by sensuous intelligence and humanistic integrity”

1989 – Camilo José Cela
“for a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man’s vulnerability”

1988 – Naguib Mahfouz
“who, through works rich in nuance – now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous – has formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind”

1987 – Joseph Brodsky
“for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity”

1986 – Wole Soyinka
“who in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence”

1985 – Claude Simon
“who in his novel combines the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition”

1984 – Jaroslav Seifert
“for his poetry, which endowed with freshness, and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man”

1983 – William Golding
“for his novels, which with the perspicuity of realistic narrative art and the diversity and universality of myth, illuminate the human condition in the world of today”

1982 – Gabriel García Márquez
“for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”

1981 – Elias Canetti
“for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power”

1980 – Czesław Miłosz
“who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts”

1979 – Odysseas Elytis
“for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness”

1978 – Isaac Bashevis Singer
“for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life”

1977 – Vicente Aleixandre
“for a creative poetic writing, which illuminates man’s condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars”

1976 – Saul Bellow
“for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work”

1975 – Eugenio Montale
“for his distinctive poetry, which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions”

1974 – Eyvind Johnson
“for a narrative art, farseeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom”

1974 – Harry Martinson
“for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos”

1973 – Patrick White
“for an epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature”

1972 – Heinrich Böll
“for his writing, which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature”

1971 – Pablo Neruda
“for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”

1970 – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”

1969 – Samuel Beckett
“for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation”

1968 – Yasunari Kawabata
“for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind”

1967 – Miguel Ángel Asturias
“for his vivid literary achievement, deep-rooted in the national traits and traditions of Indian peoples of Latin America”

1966 – Shmuel Yosef Agnon
“for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people”

1966 – Nelly Sachs
“for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel’s destiny with touching strength”

1965 – Mikhail Sholokhov
“for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”

1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre
“for his work, which rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age”

1963 – Giorgos Seferis
“for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture”

1962 – John Steinbeck
“for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”

1961 – Ivo Andrić
“for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country”

1960 – Saint-John Perse
“for the soaring flight and the evocative imagery of his poetry, which in a visionary fashion reflects the conditions of our time”

1959 – Salvatore Quasimodo
“for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times”

1958 – Boris Pasternak
“for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition”

1957 – Albert Camus
“for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”

1956 – Juan Ramón Jiménez
“for his lyrical poetry, which in Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistical purity”

1955 – Halldór Laxness
“for his vivid epic power, which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland”

1954 – Ernest Hemingway
“for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”

1953 – Winston Churchill
“for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”

1952 – François Mauriac
“for the deep spiritual insight and the artistic intensity with which he has in his novels penetrated the drama of human life”

1951 – Pär Lagerkvist
“for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavours in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind”

1950 – Bertrand Russell
“in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”

1949 – William Faulkner
“for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”

1948 – Thomas Stearns Eliot
“for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”

1947 – André Gide
“for his comprehensive and artistically significant writings, in which human problems and conditions have been presented with a fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight”

1946 – Hermann Hesse
“for his inspired writings, which while growing in boldness and penetration, exemplify the classical humanitarian ideals and high qualities of style”

1945 – Gabriela Mistral
“for her lyric poetry, which inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world”

1944 – Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
“for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style”

1943
Not Awarded

1942
Not Awarded

1941
Not Awarded

1940
Not Awarded

1939 – Frans Eemil Sillanpää
“for his deep understanding of his country’s peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature”

1938 – Pearl Buck
“for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces”

1937 – Roger Martin du Gard
“for the artistic power and truth with which he has depicted human conflict as well as some fundamental aspects of contemporary life in his novel cycle Les Thibault”

1936 – Eugene O’Neill
“for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy”

1935
Not Awarded

1934 – Luigi Pirandello
“for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art”

1933 – Ivan Bunin
“for the strict artistry with which he has carried on the classical Russian traditions in prose writing”

1932
John Galsworthy
“for his distinguished art of narration, which takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga”

1931 – Erik Axel Karlfeldt
“The poetry of Erik Axel Karlfeldt”

1930 – Sinclair Lewis
“for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters”

1929 – Thomas Mann
“principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature”

1928 – Sigrid Undset
“principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”

1927 – Henri Bergson
“in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”

1926 – Grazia Deledda
“for her idealistically inspired writings, which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general”

1925 – George Bernard Shaw
“for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty”

1924 – Władysław Reymont
“for his great national epic, The Peasants”

1923 – William Butler Yeats
“for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”

1922 – Jacinto Benavente
“for the happy manner in which he has continued the illustrious traditions of the Spanish drama”

1921 – Anatole France
“in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament”

1920 – Knut Hamsun
“for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil”

1919 – Carl Spitteler
“in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring”

1918
Not Awarded

1917 – Karl Adolph Gjellerup
“for his varied and rich poetry, which is inspired by lofty ideals”

1917 – Henrik Pontoppidan
“for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark”

1916 – Verner von Heidenstam
“in recognition of his significance as the leading representative of a new era in our literature”

1915 – Romain Rolland
“as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings”

1914
Not Awarded

1913 – Rabindranath Tagore
“because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”

1912 – Gerhart Hauptmann
“primarily in recognition of his fruitful, varied and outstanding production in the realm of dramatic art”

1911 – Maurice Maeterlinck
“in appreciation of his many-sided literary activities, and especially of his dramatic works, which are distinguished by a wealth of imagination and by a poetic fancy, which reveals, sometimes in the guise of a fairy tale, a deep inspiration, while in a mysterious way they appeal to the readers’ own feelings and stimulate their imaginations”

1910 – Paul von Heyse
“as a tribute to the consummate artistry, permeated with idealism, which he has demonstrated during his long productive career as a lyric poet, dramatist, novelist and writer of world-renowned short stories”

1909 – Selma Lagerlöf
“in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings”

1908 – Rudolf Christoph Eucken
“in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life”

1907 – Rudyard Kipling
“in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration that characterize the creations of this world-famous author”

1906 – Giosuè Carducci
“not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces”

1905 – Henryk Sienkiewicz
“because of his outstanding merits as an epic writer”

1904 – Frédéric Mistral
“in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist”

1904 – José Echegaray
“in recognition of the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama”

1903 – Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
“as a tribute to his noble, magnificent and versatile poetry, which has always been distinguished by both the freshness of its inspiration and the rare purity of its spirit”

1902 – Theodor Mommsen
“the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work A History of Rome”

1901 – Sully Prudhomme
“in special recognition of his poetic composition, which gives evidence of lofty idealism, artistic perfection and a rare combination of the qualities of both heart and intellect”

2023
Author: Paul Lynch
Prophet Song

2022
Author: Shehan Karunatilaka
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

2021
Author: Damon Galgut
The Promise

2020
Author: Douglas Stuart
Shuggie Bain

2019
Author: Margaret Atwood
The Testaments
Author: Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other

2018
Author: Anna Burns
Milkman

2017
Author: George Saunders
Lincoln in the Bardo

2016
Author: Paul Beatty
The Sellout

2015
Author: Marlon James
A Brief History of Seven Killings

2014
Author: Richard Flanagan
The Narrow Road to the Deep North

2013
Author: Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries

2012
Author: Hilary Mantel
Bring Up the Bodies

2011
Author: Julian Barnes
The Sense of an Ending

2010
Author: Howard Jacobson
The Finkler Question

2009
Author: Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall

2008
Author: Aravind Adiga
The White Tiger

2007
Author: Anne Enright
The Gathering

2006
Author: Kiran Desai
The Inheritance of Loss

2005
Author: John Banville
The Sea

2004
Author: Alan Hollinghurst
The Line of Beauty

2003
Author: DBC Pierre
Vernon God Little

2002
Author: Yann Martel
Life of Pi

2001
Author: Peter Carey
True History of the Kelly Gang

2000
Author: Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin

1999
Author: J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace

1998
Author: Ian McEwan
Amsterdam

1997
Author: Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things

1996
Author: Graham Swift
Last Orders

1995
Author: Pat Barker
The Ghost Road

1994
Author: James Kelman
How Late It Was, How Late

1993
Author: Roddy Doyle
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

1992
Author: Michael Ondaatje
The English Patient

1992
Author: Barry Unsworth
Sacred Hunger

1991
Author: Ben Okri
The Famished Road

1990
Author: A. S. Byatt
Possession

1989
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day

1988
Author: Peter Carey
Oscar and Lucinda

1987
Author: Penelope Lively
Moon Tiger

1986
Author: Kingsley Amis
The Old Devils

1985
Author: Keri Hulme
The Bone People

1984
Author: Anita Brookner
Hotel du Lac

1983
Author: J. M. Coetzee
Life & Times of Michael K

1982
Author: Thomas Keneally
Schindler’s Ark

1981
Author: Salman Rushdie
Midnight’s Children

1980
Author: William Golding
Rites of Passage

1979
Author: Penelope Fitzgerald
Offshore

1978
Author: Iris Murdoch
The Sea, the Sea

1977
Author: Paul Scott
Staying On

1976
Author: David Storey
Saville

1975
Author: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Heat and Dust

1974
Author: Nadine Gordimer
The Conservationist
Author: Stanley Middleton
Holiday

1973
Author: J. G. Farrell
The Siege of Krishnapur

1972
Author: John Berger
G.

1971
Author: V. S. Naipaul
In a Free State

1970
Author: Bernice Rubens
The Elected Member

1969
Author: P. H. Newby
Something to Answer For

2023
Nettle & Bone
Author: T. Kingfisher

2022
A Desolation Called Peace
Author: Arkady Martine

2021
Network Effect
Author: Martha Wells

2020
A Memory Called Empire
Author: Arkady Martine

2019
The Calculating Stars
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal

2018
The Stone Sky
Author: N. K. Jemisin

2017
The Obelisk Gate
Author: N. K. Jemisin

2016
The Fifth Season
Author: N. K. Jemisin

2015
The Three-Body Problem
Author: Cixin Liu
Translated: Ken Liu

2014
Ancillary Justice
Author: Ann Leckie

2013
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas
Author: John Scalzi

2012
Among Others
Author: Jo Walton

2011
Blackout/All Clear
Author: Connie Willis

2010 (tie)
The City & the City
Author: China Miéville

The Windup Girl
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

2009
The Graveyard Book
Author: Neil Gaiman

2008
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Author: Michael Chabon

2007
Rainbows End
Author: Vernor Vinge

2006
Spin
Author: Robert Charles Wilson

2005
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Author: Susanna Clarke

2004
Paladin of Souls
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

2003
Hominids
Author: Robert J. Sawyer

2002
American Gods
Author: Neil Gaiman

2001
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Author: J. K. Rowling

2000
A Deepness in the Sky
Author: Vernor Vinge

1999
To Say Nothing of the Dog
Author: Connie Willis

1998
Forever Peace
Author: Joe Haldeman

1997
Blue Mars
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

1996
The Diamond Age
Author: Neal Stephenson

1995
Mirror Dance
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

1994
Green Mars
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

1993 (tie)
Doomsday Book
Author: Connie Willis

A Fire Upon the Deep
Author: Vernor Vinge

1992
Barrayar
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

1991
The Vor Game
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold

1990
Hyperion
Author: Dan Simmons

1989
Cyteen
Author: C. J. Cherryh

1988
The Uplift War
Author: David Brin

1987
Speaker for the Dead
Author: Orson Scott Card

1986
Ender’s Game
Author: Orson Scott Card

1985
Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson

1984
Startide Rising
Author: David Brin

1983
Foundation’s Edge
Author: Isaac Asimov

1982
Downbelow Station
Author: C. J. Cherryh

1981
The Snow Queen
Author: Joan D. Vinge

1980
The Fountains of Paradise
Author: Arthur C. Clarke

1979
Dreamsnake
Author: Vonda N. McIntyre

1978
Gateway
Author: Frederik Pohl

1977
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Author: Kate Wilhelm

1976
The Forever War
Author: Joe Haldeman

1975
The Dispossessed
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

1974
Rendezvous with Rama
Author: Arthur C. Clarke

1973
The Gods Themselves
Author: Isaac Asimov

1972
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Author: Philip José Farmer

1971
Ringworld
Author: Larry Niven

1970
The Left Hand of Darkness
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

1969
Stand on Zanzibar
Author: John Brunner

1968
Lord of Light
Author: Roger Zelazny

1967
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

1966 (tie)
Dune
Author: Frank Herbert

“…And Call Me Conrad” (expanded as This Immortal)
Author: Roger Zelazny

1965
The Wanderer
Author: Fritz Leiber

1964
“Here Gather the Stars” (book title Way Station)
Author: Clifford D. Simak

1963
The Man in the High Castle
Author: Philip K. Dick

1962
Stranger in a Strange Land
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

1961
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Author: Walter M. Miller Jr.

1960
Starship Troopers
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

1959
A Case of Conscience
Author: James Blish

1958
The Big Time
Author: Fritz Leiber

1956
Double Star
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

1955
They’d Rather Be Right (aka The Forever Machine)
Author: Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

1953
The Demolished Man
Author: Alfred Bester

2023
Author: R. F. Kuang
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution

2022
Author: P. Djèlí Clark
A Master of Djinn

2021
Author: Martha Wells
Network Effect

2020
Author: Sarah Pinsker
A Song for a New Day

2019
Author: Mary Robinette Kowal
The Calculating Stars

2018
Author: N. K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky

2017
Author: Charlie Jane Anders
All the Birds in the Sky

2016
Author: Naomi Novik
Uprooted

2015
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation

2014
Author: Ann Leckie
Ancillary Justice

2013
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
2312

2012
Author: Jo Walton
Among Others

2011
Author: Connie Willis
Blackout/All Clear

2010
Author: Paolo Bacigalupi
The Windup Girl

2009
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Powers

2008
Author: Michael Chabon
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

2007
Author: Jack McDevitt
Seeker

2006
Author: Joe Haldeman
Camouflage

2005
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Paladin of Souls

2004
Author: Elizabeth Moon
The Speed of Dark

2003
Author: Neil Gaiman
American Gods

2002
Author: Catherine Asaro
The Quantum Rose

2001
Author: Greg Bear
Darwin’s Radio

2000
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Parable of the Talents

1999
Author: Joe Haldeman
Forever Peace

1998
Author: Vonda N. McIntyre
The Moon and the Sun

1997
Author: Nicola Griffith
Slow River

1996
Author: Robert J. Sawyer
The Terminal Experiment

1995
Author: Greg Bear
Moving Mars

1994
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Red Mars

1993
Author: Connie Willis
Doomsday Book

1992
Author: Michael Swanwick
Stations of the Tide

1991
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea

1990
Author: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
The Healer’s War

1989
Author: Lois McMaster Bujold
Falling Free

1988
Author: Pat Murphy
The Falling Woman

1987
Author: Orson Scott Card
Speaker for the Dead

1986
Author: Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Game

1985
Author: William Gibson
Neuromancer

1984
Author: David Brin
Startide Rising

1983
Author: Michael Bishop
No Enemy But Time

1982
Author: Gene Wolfe
The Claw of the Conciliator

1981
Author: Gregory Benford
Timescape

1980
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
The Fountains of Paradise

1979
Author: Vonda N. McIntyre
Dreamsnake

1978
Author: Frederik Pohl
Gateway

1977
Author: Frederik Pohl
Man Plus

1976
Author: Joe Haldeman
The Forever War

1975
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed

1974
Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Rendezvous with Rama

1973
Author: Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves

1972
Author: Robert Silverberg
A Time of Changes

1971
Author: Larry Niven
Ringworld

1970
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand of Darkness

1969
Author: Alexei Panshin
Rite of Passage

1968
Author: Samuel R. Delany
The Einstein Intersection

1967
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Babel-17

1967
Author: Daniel Keyes
Flowers for Algernon

1966
Author: Frank Herbert
Dune

2023
Hot Dog
Author: Doug Salati

2022
Watercress
Author: Andrea Wang

2021
We Are Water Protectors
Author: Carole Lindstrom

2020
The Undefeated
Author: Kwame Alexander

2019
Hello Lighthouse
Author: Sophie Blackall

2018
Wolf in the Snow
Author: Matthew Cordell

2017
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Author: Javaka Steptoe

2016
Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear
Author: Lindsay Mattick

2015
The Adventures of Beekle, the Unimaginary Friend
Author: Dan Santat

2014
Locomotive
Author: Brian Floca

2013
This Is Not My Hat
Author: Jon Klassen

2012
A Ball for Daisy
Author: Chris Raschka

2011
A Sick Day for Amos McGee
Author: Philip C. Stead

2010
The Lion & the Mouse
Author: Jerry Pinkney

2009
The House in the Night
Author: Susan Marie Swanson

2008
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Author: Brian Selznick

2007
Flotsam
Author: David Wiesner

2006
The Hello, Goodbye Window
Author: Norton Juster

2005
Kitten’s First Full Moon
Author: Kevin Henkes

2004
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers
Author: Mordicai Gerstein

2003
My Friend Rabbit
Author: Eric Rohmann

2002
The Three Pigs
Author: David Wiesner

2001
So You Want To Be President?
Author: Judith St. George

2000
Joseph Had a Little Overcoat
Author: Simms Taback

1999
Snowflake Bentley
Author: Jacqueline Briggs Martin

1998
Rapunzel
Author: Paul O. Zelinsky

1997
Golem
Author: David Wisniewski

1996
Officer Buckle and Gloria
Author: Peggy Rathmann

1995
Smoky Night
Author: Eve Bunting

1994
Grandfather’s Journey
Author: Allen Say

1993
Mirette on the High Wire
Author: Emily Arnold McCully

1992
Tuesday
Author: David Wiesner

1991
Black and White
Author: David Macaulay

1990
Lon Po Po : a Red-Riding Hood Story from China
Author: Ed Young

1989
Song and Dance Man
Author: Karen Ackerman

1988
Owl Moon
Author: Jane Yolen

1987
Hey, Al
Author: Arthur Yorinks

1986
The Polar Express
Author: Chris Van Allsburg

1985
Saint George and the Dragon
Author: Margaret Hodges

1984
The Glorious Flight : Across the Channel with Louis Blériot
Author: Alice and Martin Provensen

1983
Shadow
Author: Blaise Cendrars

1982
Jumanji
Author: Chris Van Allsburg

1981
Fables
Author: Arnold Lobel

1980
Ox-Cart Man
Author: Donald Hall

1979
The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses
Author: Paul Goble

1978
Noah’s Ark
Author: Peter Spier

1977
Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions
Author: Margaret Musgrove

1976
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears
Author: Verna Aardema

1975
Arrow to the Sun: A Pueblo Indian Tale
Author: Gerald McDermott

1974
Duffy and the Devil
Author: Harve Zemach

1973
The Funny Little Woman
Author: Arlene Mosel

1972
One Fine Day
Author: Nonny Hogrogian

1971
A Story, a Story: An African Tale
Author: Gail E. Haley

1970
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble
Author: William Steig

1969
The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship
Author: Arthur Ransome

1968
Drummer Hoff
Author: Barbara Emberley

1967
Sam, Bangs & Moonshine
Author: Evaline Ness

1966
Always Room for One More
Author: Sorche Nic Leodhas

1965
May I Bring a Friend?
Author: Beatrice Schenk de Regniers

1964
Where the Wild Things Are
Author: Maurice Sendak

1963
The Snowy Day
Author: Ezra Jack Keats

1962
Once a Mouse…
Author: Marcia Brown

1961
Baboushka and the Three Kings
Author: Ruth Robbins

1960
Nine Days to Christmas
Author: Marie Hall Ets and Aurora Labastida

1959
Chanticleer and the Fox
Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

1958
Time of Wonder
Author: Robert McCloskey

1957
A Tree is Nice
Author: Janice Udry

1956
Frog Went A-Courtin’
Author: John Langstaff

1955
Cinderella: Or, the Little Glass Slipper
Author: Charles Perrault

1954
Madeline’s Rescue
Author: Ludwig Bemelmans

1953
The Biggest Bear
Author: Lynd Ward

1952
Finders Keepers
Author: Will and Nicolas

1951
The Egg Tree
Author: Katherine Milhous

1950
Song of the Swallows
Author: Leo Politi

1949
The Big Snow
Author: Berta and Elmer Hader

1948
White Snow, Bright Snow
Author: Alvin Tresselt

1947
The Little Island
Author: Margaret Wise Brown

1946
The Rooster Crows: a Book of American Rhymes and Jingles
Author: Maud and Miska Petersham

1945
Prayer for a Child
Author: Rachel Field

1944
Many Moons
Author: James Thurber

1943
The Little House
Author: Virginia Lee Burton

1942
Make Way for Ducklings
Author: Robert McCloskey

1941
They Were Strong and Good
Author: Robert Lawson

1940
Abraham Lincoln
Author: Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire

1939
Mei Li
Author: Thomas Handforth

1938
Animals of the Bible
Author: Dorothy P. Lathrop

2023
Amina Luqman-Dawson
Freewater

2022
Donna Barba Higuera
The Last Cuentista

2021
Tae Keller
When You Trap a Tiger

2020
Jerry Craft
New Kid

2019
Meg Medina
Merci Suárez Changes Gears

2018
Erin Entrada Kelly
Hello, Universe

2017
Kelly Barnhill
The Girl Who Drank the Moon

2016
Matt de la Peña
Last Stop on Market Street

2015
Kwame Alexander
The Crossover

2014
Kate DiCamillo
Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

2013
Katherine Applegate
The One and Only Ivan

2012
Jack Gantos
Dead End in Norvelt

2011
Clare Vanderpool
Moon Over Manifest

2010
Rebecca Stead
When You Reach Me

2009
Neil Gaiman
The Graveyard Book

2008
Laura Amy Schlitz
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village

2007
Susan Patron
The Higher Power of Lucky

2006
Lynne Rae Perkins
Criss Cross

2005
Cynthia Kadohata
Kira-Kira

2004
Kate DiCamillo
The Tale of Despereaux

2003
Avi
Crispin: The Cross of Lead

2002
Linda Sue Park
A Single Shard

2001
Richard Peck
A Year Down Yonder

2000
Christopher Paul Curtis
Bud, Not Buddy

1999
Louis Sachar
Holes

1998
Karen Hesse
Out of the Dust

1997
E. L. Konigsburg
The View from Saturday

1996
Karen Cushman
The Midwife’s Apprentice

1995
Sharon Creech
Walk Two Moons

1994
Lois Lowry
The Giver

1993
Cynthia Rylant
Missing May

1992
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Shiloh

1991
Jerry Spinelli
Maniac Magee

1990
Lois Lowry
Number the Stars

1989
Paul Fleischman
Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices

1988
Russell Freedman
Lincoln: A Photobiography

1987
Sid Fleischman
The Whipping Boy

1986
Patricia MacLachlan
Sarah, Plain and Tall

1985
Robin McKinley
The Hero and the Crown

1984
Beverly Cleary
Dear Mr. Henshaw

1983
Cynthia Voigt
Dicey’s Song

1982
Nancy Willard
A Visit to William Blake’s Inn

1981
Katherine Paterson
Jacob Have I Loved

1980
Joan Blos
A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal

1979
Ellen Raskin
The Westing Game

1978
Katherine Paterson
Bridge to Terabithia

1977
Mildred Taylor
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

1976
Susan Cooper
The Grey King

1975
Virginia Hamilton
M. C. Higgins, the Great

1974
Paula Fox
The Slave Dancer

1973
Jean Craighead George
Julie of the Wolves

1972
Robert C. O’Brien
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

1971
Betsy Byars
Summer of the Swans

1970
William H. Armstrong
Sounder

1969
Lloyd Alexander
The High King

1968
E. L. Konigsburg
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

1967
Irene Hunt
Up a Road Slowly

1966
Elizabeth Borton de Treviño
I, Juan de Pareja

1965
Maia Wojciechowska
Shadow of a Bull

1964
Emily Cheney Neville
It’s Like This, Cat

1963
Madeleine L’Engle
A Wrinkle in Time

1962
Elizabeth George Speare
The Bronze Bow

1961
Scott O’Dell
Island of the Blue Dolphins

1960
Joseph Krumgold
Onion John

1959
Elizabeth George Speare
The Witch of Blackbird Pond

1958
Harold Keith
Rifles for Watie

1957
Virginia Sorensen
Miracles on Maple Hill

1956
Jean Lee Latham
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch

1955
Meindert DeJong
The Wheel on the School

1954
Joseph Krumgold
…And Now Miguel

1953
Ann Nolan Clark
Secret of the Andes

1952
Eleanor Estes
Ginger Pye

1951
Elizabeth Yates
Amos Fortune, Free Man

1950
Marguerite de Angeli
The Door in the Wall

1949
Marguerite Henry
King of the Wind

1948
William Pène du Bois
The Twenty-One Balloons

1947
Carolyn Sherwin Bailey
Miss Hickory

1946
Lois Lenski
Strawberry Girl

1945
Robert Lawson
Rabbit Hill

1944
Esther Forbes
Johnny Tremain

1943
Elizabeth Janet Gray
Adam of the Road

1942
Walter D. Edmonds
The Matchlock Gun

1941
Armstrong Sperry
Call It Courage

1940
James Daugherty
Daniel Boone

1939
Elizabeth Enright
Thimble Summer

1938
Kate Seredy
The White Stag

1937
Ruth Sawyer
Roller Skates

1936
Carol Ryrie Brink
Caddie Woodlawn

1935
Monica Shannon
Dobry

1934
Cornelia Meigs
Invincible Louisa

1933
Elizabeth Foreman Lewis
Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze

1932
Laura Adams Armer
Waterless Mountain

1931
Elizabeth Coatsworth
The Cat Who Went to Heaven

1930
Rachel Field
Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

1929
Eric P. Kelly
The Trumpeter of Krakow

1928
Dhan Gopal Mukerji
Gay Neck, the Story of a Pigeon

1927
Will James
Smoky the Cow Horse

1926
Arthur Bowie Chrisman
Shen of the Sea

1925
Charles Finger
Tales from Silver Lands

1924
Charles Boardman Hawes
The Dark Frigate

1923
Hugh Lofting
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle

1922
Hendrik Willem van Loon
The Story of Mankind

2023
Author: Craig Santos Perez
from unincorporated territory [åmot]

2022
Author: John Keene
Punks: New & Selected Poems

2021
Author: Martín Espada
Floaters

2020
Author: Don Mee Choi
DMZ Colony

2019
Author: Arthur Sze
Sight Lines

2018
Author: Justin Phillip Reed
Indecency

2017
Author: Frank Bidart
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016

2016
Author: Daniel Borzutzky
The Performance of Becoming Human

2015
Author: Robin Coste Lewis
Voyage of the Sable Venus

2014
Author: Louise Glück
Faithful and Virtuous Night

2013
Author: Mary Szybist
Incarnadine

2012
Author: David Ferry
Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations

2011
Author: Nikky Finney
Head Off & Split

2010
Author: Terrance Hayes
Lighthead

2009
Author: Keith Waldrop
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

2008
Author: Mark Doty
Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems

2007
Author: Robert Hass
Time and Materials: Poems, 1997–2005

2006
Author: Nathaniel Mackey
Splay Anthem

2005
Author: W. S. Merwin
Migration: New and Selected Poems

2004
Author: Jean Valentine
Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003

2003
Author: C. K. Williams
The Singing

2002
Author: Ruth Stone
In the Next Galaxy

2001
Author: Alan Dugan
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry

2000
Author: Lucille Clifton
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000

1999
Author: Ai
Vice: New and Selected Poems

1998
Author: Gerald Stern
This Time: New and Selected Poems

1997
Author: William Meredith
Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems

1996
Author: Hayden Carruth
Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey

1995
Author: Stanley Kunitz
Passing Through: The Later Poems

1994
Author: James Tate
A Worshipful Company of Fletchers

1993
Author: A. R. Ammons
Garbage

1992
Author: Mary Oliver
New and Selected Poems

1991
Author: Philip Levine
What Work Is

1983
Author: Galway Kinnell
Selected Poems

Author: Charles Wright
Country Music: Selected Early Poems

1982
Author: William Bronk
Life Supports: New and Collected Poems

1981
Author: Lisel Mueller
The Need to Hold Still

1980
Author: Philip Levine
Ashes: Poems New and Old

1979
Author: James Merrill
Mirabell: Book of Numbers

1978
Author: Howard Nemerov
The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov

1977
Author: Richard Eberhart
Collected Poems, 1930–1976

1976
Author: John Ashbery
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror

1975
Author: Marilyn Hacker
Presentation Piece

1974
Allen Ginsberg
The Fall of America: Poems of these States, 1965–1971

Adrienne Rich
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

1973
Author: A. R. Ammons
Collected Poems, 1951–1971

1972
Howard Moss
Selected Poems

Frank O’Hara
The Collected Works of Frank O’Hara

1971
Author: Mona Van Duyn
To See, To Take

1970
Author: Elizabeth Bishop
The Complete Poems

1969
Author: John Berryman
His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

1968
Author: Robert Bly
The Light Around the Body

1967
Author: James Merrill
Nights and Days

1966
Author: James Dickey
Buckdancer’s Choice

1965
Author: Theodore Roethke
The Far Field

1964
Author: John Crowe Ransom
Selected Poems

1963
Author: William Stafford
Traveling Through the Dark

1962
Author: Alan Dugan
Poems

1961
Author: Randall Jarrell
The Woman at the Washington Zoo

1960
Author: Robert Lowell
Life Studies

1959
Author: Theodore Roethke
Words for the Wind

1958
Author: Robert Penn Warren
Promises: Poems, 1954–1956

1957
Author: Richard Wilbur
Things of This World

1956
Author: W. H. Auden
The Shield of Achilles

1955
Author: Wallace Stevens
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

1954
Author: Conrad Aiken
Collected Poems

1953
Author: Archibald MacLeish
Collected Poems, 1917–1952

1952
Author: Marianne Moore
Collected Poems

1951
Author: Wallace Stevens
The Auroras of Autumn

1950
Author: William Carlos Williams
Paterson: Book Three and Selected Poems

2023
Author: Justin Torres
Blackouts

2022
Author: Tess Gunty
The Rabbit Hutch

2021
Author: Jason Mott
Hell of a Book

2020
Author: Charles Yu
Interior Chinatown

2019
Author: Susan Choi
Trust Exercise

2018
Author: Sigrid Nunez
The Friend

2017
Author: Jesmyn Ward
Sing, Unburied, Sing

2016
Author: Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad

2015
Author: Adam Johnson
Fortune Smiles

2014
Author: Phil Klay
Redeployment

2013
Author: James McBride
The Good Lord Bird

2012
Author: Louise Erdrich
The Round House

2011
Author: Jesmyn Ward
Salvage the Bones

2010
Author: Jaimy Gordon
Lord of Misrule

2009
Author: Colum McCann
Let the Great World Spin

2008
Author: Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country

2007
Author: Denis Johnson
Tree of Smoke

2006
Author: Richard Powers
The Echo Maker

2005
Author: William T. Vollmann
Europe Central

2004
Author: Lily Tuck
The News from Paraguay

2003
Author: Shirley Hazzard
The Great Fire

2002
Author: Julia Glass
Three Junes

2001
Author: Jonathan Franzen
The Corrections

2000
Author: Susan Sontag
In America

1999
Author: Ha Jin
Waiting

1998
Author: Alice McDermott
Charming Billy

1997
Author: Charles Frazier
Cold Mountain

1996
Author: Andrea Barrett
Ship Fever and Other Stories

1995
Author: Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater

1994
Author: William Gaddis
A Frolic of His Own

1993
Author: E. Annie Proulx
The Shipping News

1992
Author: Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses

1991
Author: Norman Rush
Mating

1990
Author: Charles Johnson
Middle Passage

1989
Author: John Casey
Spartina

1988
Author: Pete Dexter
Paris Trout

1987
Author: Larry Heinemann
Paco’s Story

1986
Author: E.L. Doctorow
World’s Fair

1985
Author: Don DeLillo
White Noise

1984
Author: Ellen Gilchrist
Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

1983
Author: Alice Walker
The Color Purple

1983
Author: Eudora Welty
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty

1982
Author: John Updike
Rabbit is Rich

1982
Author: William Maxwell
So Long, See You Tomorrow

1981
Author: Wright Morris
Plains Song: For Female Voices

1981
Author: John Cheever
The Stories of John Cheever

1980
Author: William Styron
Sophie’s Choice

1980
Author: John Irving
The World According to Garp

1979
Author: Tim O’Brien
Going After Cacciato

1978
Author: Mary Lee Settle
Blood Tie

1977
Author: Wallace Stegner
The Spectator Bird

1976
Author: William Gaddis
J R

1975
Author: Robert Stone
Dog Soldiers

1975
Author: Thomas Williams
The Hair of Harold Roux

1974
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Gravity’s Rainbow

1974
Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories

1973
Author: John Barth
Chimera

1973
Author: John Edward Williams
Augustus

1972
Author: Flannery O’Connor
The Complete Stories

1971
Author: Saul Bellow
Mr. Sammler’s Planet

1970
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
them

1969
Author: Jerzy Kosinski
Steps

1968
Author: Thornton Wilder
The Eighth Day

1967
Author: Bernard Malamud
The Fixer

1966
Author: Katherine Anne Porter
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

1965
Author: Saul Bellow
Herzog

1964
Author: John Updike
The Centaur

1963
Author: J. F. Powers
Morte d’Urban

1962
Author: Walker Percy
The Moviegoer

1961
Author: Conrad Richter
The Waters of Kronos

1960
Author: Philip Roth
Goodbye, Columbus

1959
Author: Bernard Malamud
The Magic Barrel

1958
Author: John Cheever
The Wapshot Chronicle

1957
Author: Wright Morris
The Field of Vision

1956
Author: John O’Hara
Ten North Frederick

1955
Author: William Faulkner
A Fable

1954
Author: Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Augie March

1953
Author: Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man

1952
Author: James Jones
From Here to Eternity

1951
Author: William Faulkner
The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

1950
Author: Nelson Algren
The Man with the Golden Arm