Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 2017: Complete list of winners

The 2017 Pulitzer Prizes celebrated literature that grappled unflinchingly with America’s most pressing social and historical wounds. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad claimed the Fiction prize, a novel that reimagined the famous network as an actual railroad beneath American soil, turning historical atrocity into metaphysical journey. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City won General Nonfiction with its immersive investigation of Milwaukee’s housing crisis, while Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water took History for its definitive account of the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising and its reverberations through decades of criminal justice policy. The recognition of these books reflected a broader moment in American letters—one where writers were centering marginalized voices and systemic injustice as central to understanding the nation’s character.

Beyond the headline prizes, that year’s selections showed similar thematic cohesion. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat won the Drama award for its portrait of a Rust Belt community fractured by economic decline and racial tension, while Hisham Matar’s The Return brought the Biography prize to a meditation on fatherhood, memory, and loss in Libya. Tyehimba Jess’s Olio claimed Poetry with its inventive, historical exploration of Black performers in nineteenth-century America, written partly in verse, partly in prose fragments. Together, these six winners demonstrated how the Pulitzer Prizes—America’s most prestigious awards for journalism, letters, and the arts—were honoring work that refused easy answers and centered human dignity amid structural hardship.

Below, you’ll find complete details on all the 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners across these major literary categories.

Biography

Drama

Fiction

General Nonfiction

History

Poetry

  • Cover of Olio Olio by Tyehimba Jess