When we first spoke (we all live in different cities, and met in person only once), in June of 2011, Maureen, Susan, and I made a few fundamental agreements that had, surely, been made by other juries in the past. The winning book, be it a novel or short-story collection, must have been written by an American, and should, ideally, be in some way about American life.

A different Pulitzer jury in 2012 might very well have put forward three different books, one of which might have pleased the Pulitzer board better than ours did.Ī proper respect for the mysterious aspects of fiction is encouraged by the Pulitzer’s guidelines, which are gratifyingly loose. I can tell you what three people, in 2012, were thinking of.įirst, and probably most obvious, the members of any jury are possessed of particular tastes and opinions, and, however they may strive for it, absolute objectivity is impossible. Really? That book? What were those people thinking of? Like many, I’ve often greeted the announcement of certain prizewinners with bafflement. I did, however, learn a good deal about how short lists are formed, how “best” books are selected-a process that had hitherto been mysterious to me. No one outside the board will ever know why they decided to withhold the prize. We agreed, by the end of all our reading and discussion, that contemporary American fiction is diverse, inventive, ambitious, and (maybe most important) still a lively, and therefore living, art form.

We never felt as if we were scraping around for books that were passable enough to slap a prize onto. We were, all three of us, shocked by the board’s decision (non-decision), because we were, in fact, thrilled, not only by the books we’d nominated but also by several other books that came within millimetres of the final cut.

Less pulitzer prize winning novel