The Laureates.
Every laureate, finalist, and longlisted book since the founding of the awards in 1980. Two hundred and forty-five books; two hundred and thirty-one authors; forty-six seasons of American reading. Each row is a link to the book's citation, the year's ceremony, and — where available — a passage from the winning book.
Additional years available upon browsing the full archive by category or decade.
Browse the archive by category →The archive,
read another way.
The foundation publishes, twice a year, essays that traverse the archive along an axis it was not built to describe. The essays are commissioned from writers, historians, and translators, and are republished in the Reading Room.
Cormorant, Coffee House, Kore, Milkweed, and the shape of American independence.
Thirty-one of our forty-five fiction laureates were published by houses of under a hundred titles per year. An essay by Frances Ede on the counter-history of the American novel that the small presses have quietly written.
Read the essay →The word attend,and how it entered the vocabulary of American criticism.
A statistical and stylistic reading of forty-six years of citations, tracking the terms the panels have most reached for. First appearance of attend: 1994. Peak appearance: 2019–present.
Read the essay →Thirty-eight languages, forty-one traditions in translation.
A companion to the Translated Literature archive, with an essay by Ivan Kwok on the languages we have most and least often given a home to, and the language we hope to hear from next.
Read the essay →