This year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction went to Adam Johnson for The Orphan Master’s Son. The committee declared the book was “an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart." The Orphan Master’s Son is Johnson’s third book.  He is currently a professor at Stanford University. The other fiction finalists were Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and Nathan Englander’s  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

In poetry, Sharon Olds won the Pulitzer for her collection Stag’s Leap; in Nonfiction, Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys; History, Fredrik Logevall’s Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam; and in Biography, Tom Reiss’s The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo. Winners receive $10,000 and a certificate at a luncheon at Columbia University on May 30^th. 

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was not awarded in 2012, a controversial decision and only the eleventh time in the history of the Pulitzer that the committee declined to award a fiction prize. The three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction 2012 were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and the late David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

Sources: The LA Times and The Huffington Post

For more information visit:

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-adam-johnson-wins-the-pulitzer-prize-in-fiction-for-2013-20130415,0,7088248.story

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/15/pulitzer-prize-fiction-2013_n_3086514.html