Honours & laurels
Two Nobel Prizes in Literature, the Booker won twice by one writer, the Pulitzer for fiction won twice by another, and a MacArthur, a Guggenheim and a Women's Prize Winner-of-Winners between the rest. Below the roll of honour, our own Author of the Month: one writer chosen from a shortlist of three, every month since January.
2
Nobel laureates
4
Booker & Pulitzer wins
8
Award winning guests
The roll of honour
#1 · United Kingdom · Europe
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2017
The Swedish Academy called it "great emotional force" and an "abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". He talks about it as a technical problem: how much a narrator is allowed to know.
#2 · Poland · Europe
Nobel Prize in Literature, 2018
Poland's second living Nobel laureate in literature, and the rare winner whose reputation in English was built by a translator working on almost no advance.
#3 · Canada · North America
Booker Prize, twice, 2000 and 2019
One of only four writers to have won the Booker twice, nineteen years apart, with an Arthur C. Clarke Award in between for a novel nobody would call science fiction to her face.
#4 · United States · North America
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, twice, 2017 and 2020
One of four novelists ever to win the Pulitzer for fiction twice, and the only one to do it with consecutive books. He is funnier about it than you would expect.
#5 · United Kingdom · Europe
Booker Prize, 2019
The first Black woman to win the Booker in the prize's history, after eight books and four decades of building the career without waiting for permission.
#6 · Nigeria · Africa
Women's Prize 'Winner of Winners', 2020
Voted the best book to have won the Women's Prize in its first twenty five years, a novel she wrote in her twenties, and revised for four years before she let anyone read it.
#7 · United States · North America
MacArthur Fellowship, 2019
The first poet in decades to win the T.S. Eliot Prize with a debut collection, then a MacArthur two years later. He still writes prose at the pace of poetry and refuses to apologise for it.
#8 · United States · Asia
Guggenheim Fellowship, 2018
Thirty years between the first sentence and the finished novel, including a complete draft she threw away in her forties after the Tokyo interviews told her whose story it actually was.
Behind the Book Awards
Each month we shortlist three writers from that month's episodes and live recordings, and give the month to one of them. No public vote, no sponsor, just the room, the tape and what the conversation gave working writers.
Author of the Month · Restraint
Winner · 1 of 3
Kazuo Ishiguro
For a Bloomsbury workshop that made everyone cut a paragraph to twelve words and keep the feeling. Two people managed it; both were poets.
Author of the Month · The Long Game
Winner · 1 of 3
Bernardine Evaristo
For forty years of building a career instead of waiting to be discovered, to a room full of writers over fifty in Manchester who kept the Q&A running forty minutes over.
Author of the Month · Research
Winner · 1 of 3
Margaret Atwood
For the best line of the season, on being called a prophet: "It isn't prophecy, it's filing." We put it on the poster.
Author of the Month · Persistence
Winner · 1 of 3
Min Jin Lee
For reading the flat 1990s draft of Pachinko aloud before the published opening, and letting thirty years of failure do the interview's work.
Author of the Month · Sentences
Winner · 1 of 3
Ocean Vuong
For ninety minutes in Hartford spent writing one sentence each, and for making the case that prose written at the pace of poetry needs no apology.
Author of the Month · Structure
Winner · 1 of 3
Colson Whitehead
For a two hour workshop in Brooklyn that made thirty writers draw their novel as a map before lunch, after which four of them admitted their book was two books.
Author of the Month · Revision
Winner · 1 of 3
Kazuo Ishiguro
For reconstructing the four week crash of 1987 hour by hour, then reading the silver polishing passage at Conway Hall without introducing it. Nobody in the hall moved.
Author of the Month · Craft
Winner · 1 of 3
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
For the season opener at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and for spending ten unhurried minutes answering a history student who challenged her 1967 dinner table scene from the floor.
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