Demon Copperhead

In These Lists

• The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Winners)

  Since 1918, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has attempted something quietly audacious: naming, each year, a single work of fiction by an American author, preferably one dealing with American life. The result is less a list of perfect books than a running argument about what American fiction is for, taking in undisputed landmarks like The Grapes of Wrath, Beloved and To Kill a Mockingbird alongside forgotten winners, controversial choices and the occasional year when the board, notoriously, awarded nothing at all. Read in sequence, the winners form an accidental history of the United States itself: its wars, migrations, families and reinventions, told one novel at a time. Whether you're chasing the canon or hunting for the overlooked gems between the giants, this list is one of the great structured reading projects in American literature.

• Women’s Prize for Fiction (Winners)

  The Women’s Prize for Fiction (known as the Orange Prize from 1996 to 2012 and the Baileys Women’s Prize from 2014 to 2017) is awarded each year to the best full-length novel written in English by a woman of any nationality. Founded in 1996 to celebrate fiction by women, it has become one of the most prominent literary awards in the United Kingdom. Its winners run from Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Barbara Kingsolver, the only writer to have taken the prize twice. This list collects the winning novels by year.