Bibliofemme News
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07/04/2004
Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced
Edward P Jones won the fiction prize for The Known World, his novel about a black slave owner, while the prize for biography went to William Taubman's Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. Both Jones and Taubman took over 10 years to write their respective books.
Jones took a decade to write The Known World. During that time, he lost his job as a proofreader for an accounting trade publication and lost touch with much of the publishing world. When he finished, he felt so embarrassed by the delay that he notified his agent by letter instead of telephoning him.
Taubman, on the other hand, blamed history: the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, several years after he began the Khrushchev book.
"Suddenly, I had sources, I had archives," he said, adding that he could also meet family members and interview once untouchable sources, such as the head of the KGB.
"All of that was impossible until glasnost and then the collapse of the Soviet Union," Taubman said. "So suddenly from having too little material I had too much, and that's why it took another 10 years."
Other winners announced last night included Steven Hahn, who won the Pulitzer for history with A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration; Anne Applebaum, whose history of the brutal Soviet labour camps, Gulag, won for general non-fiction; and Franz Wright, who won the prize for poetry with Walking to Martha's Vineyard. Wright had been a finalist in 2002 and now joins his father, the late James Wright who won in 1972, on the Pulitzer poetry winners' roll.
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