Show In the literary world, it seems like it’s always prize season. But who actually gets all these literary prizes? It feels as though some writers have won every prize in the world—and it also feels as though some, while equally deserving, have won almost none of them. These are the kinds of thoughts that lead me to make spreadsheets, and also to share my findings with you. I couldn’t track every single prize available to writers (or at least, I couldn’t without going insane), so I stuck to the biggest and most prestigious prizes in fiction.* While putting together the data, I noticed that some writers had won several of the same prize, and some had a more diverse portfolio, so I’ve split the final results into two lists: those who have one the most prizes of those I counted, full stop, and those who have won the most distinct prizes, i.e. one of each. I also looked at who had won the most prizes for a single book. I included prizes for career work as well as for single books. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given what we know about sexism in publishing, it’s mostly men who top all the lists here. Interestingly, the women who do rank are more likely to be writers of speculative fiction (Ursula K. Le Guin, N. K. Jemisin, etc.)—possibly because winners of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards are more likely to win them multiple times than the winners of more general literary awards. On the plus side, if you haven’t read Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, this accounting may just finally convince you. * The writers who have won the most major prizes: 9 prizes: Philip Roth National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus (1960) 8 prizes: John Updike National Book Award for The Centaur (1964) 7 prizes: E. L. Doctorow NBCC Award for Ragtime (1975) + Colson Whitehead Whiting Award (2000) 6 prizes: Saul Bellow National Book Award for The Adventures of Augie March (1954) + Lois McMaster Bujold Nebula Award for Best Novel for Falling Free (1989) + William Faulkner Nobel Prize (1949) + Ursula K. Le Guin Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Left Hand of Darkness (1970) + Marilynne Robinson PEN/Hemingway Award for Housekeeping (1982) 5 prizes: Jim Crace 4 prizes: Orson
Scott Card * The writers who have won the most distinct prizes: 7: Colson Whitehead 6: Philip Roth 5: John Updike 4: E.
L. Doctorow * The most prizes for a single book: 4: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad 3: John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever Junot
Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Edward P. Jones, The Known World Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer John Updike, Rabbit is Rich *For the record, I counted the following awards and prizes, in fiction writing only (again, for sanity): the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Booker Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Costa First Novel Prize, the Costa Novel Prize, the Dos Passos Prize, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the IMPAC (now the International Dublin Literary Award), the Kirkus Prize, the LA Times Book Prize, the MacArthur Genius Grant, the Man Booker International Prize, the National Book Award, the NBCC Award, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Nobel Prize, the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN/Hemingway, the Pulitzer, the Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell, the Women’s Prize. Who has won the National Book Award twice?David McCullough has been acclaimed as a “master of the art of narrative history.” He is the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
Who won Pulitzer 4 times?Many people have won more than one Pulitzer Prize. Nelson Harding is the only person to have won a prize in two consecutive years, the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1927 and 1928. American poet Robert Frost won the Pulitzer four times from 1924 to 1943.
How many authors have won the Pulitzer Prize twice?Four writers have won two prizes each in the Fiction category: Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead.
What playwrights have won the Pulitzer Prize more than once?Whitehead, a 50-year-old New Yorker, won the 2017 prize in the same category for his book The Underground Railroad. Before him, only Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike had won the Pulitzer for fiction twice.
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