As a community of book enthusiasts, we understand that rating and interpreting books are a subjective experience. But as someone who loves reading, I find it exciting to discover new books that have been recognized for their excellence by people who have a deep understanding of literature and have won awards themselves. This often leads me to explore genres I don’t typically read, and I’ve been lucky enough to discover some amazing authors in the process. Looking back, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of award-winning books 2023 had to offer, including those that not only won the most coveted awards but also received multiple honors from prestigious literary and nonfiction awards.

This selection offers a diverse range of books, from poignant stories that connect deeply to your soul to dark fairytales with cunning princesses. All the books on this list have something unique to offer and have been recognized for their top-tier storytelling.

I’ve included some of the most prestigious literary awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature, or the Booker/International Booker Prize. There are also genre-specific awards, such as the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Moreover, I’ve included details about numerous awards and medals that are dedicated to recognizing and celebrating authors and illustrators of color.

It’s important to note that some of the books that received awards in 2023 were originally published in 2022 due to the different timings of the awards. This is a great opportunity to catch up on books you might have missed and discover the hidden gems that were celebrated during the award season!

Let’s dive in!

Introduced into the Illinois House January 23 by Representative Anne Stava-Murray and cosponsored by Representative Diane Blair-Sherlock, HB 4567 aims to protect library workers throughout the state from harassment, threats, and disorderly conduct. The bill comes in the new legislative session after the state passed the nation’s first anti-book ban bill last year and dealt with several bomb threats in the months following that bill’s passage. The new bill would amend the Criminal Code of 2012.

The bill summary reads as follows:

 Includes in offense of threatening a public official or human service provider, threatening a library employee. Provides that the threat to a public official, human service provider, or library employee includes a threat made electronically or via social media. Defines “library employee”. In the offense of threatening a public official, human service provider, or library employee, includes in the definition of “public official” an employee of any State of Illinois constitutional office, State agency, or the General Assembly. Provides that the offense of disorderly conduct includes transmitting or causing to be transmitted threats or false reports electronically or via social media. Provides that disorderly conduct includes the knowing transmission of or causing to be transmitted in any manner, including electronically or via social media, a lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene message to a public official. Provides that making a terrorist threat or falsely making a terrorist threat includes making a terrorist threat or falsely making a terrorist threat by any means of communication, including electronically or via social media. Makes other changes.

Where once library workers were not explicitly named among populations protected from threats, the new bill would include the profession by name. The threats would be investigated and taken seriously, whether they came in person or through electronic means, including social media.

Not only does naming library workers in the Criminal Code lend legitimacy to the profession–and it covers everyone within a library from professional librarians to shelvers, custodians, and others–it codifies the importance of libraries to democracy in the state. Protections would extend beyond public library workers, too. It also covers those working for private libraries.

Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and around hospitals as a child, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later frequently appear in his work as sites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a name for himself in the eighties with a series of dark, violent, experimental short stories, but over the course of his career, his writing became more conventional, earning him a broad readership and fame in the process. But what if Yu Hua had gone the other direction? What if he had gone darker, stranger, more experimental? If one is looking for someone to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism today, I would point them to Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which not only shares a fascination with the medical setting but also presents an unflinching look at the violence lurking just under the surface of the everyday. It is no coincidence then that, during a recent interview I conducted with Han Song when he was speaking of his formative influences, he told me: “I was particularly fascinated by Yu Hua at that time and even imitated him.”

Comprised of three full-length novels, Hospital, Exorcism, and Dead Souls, the trilogy begins in a fairly conventional manner. Yang Wei, a forty-year-old government worker who moonlights as a songwriter, is struck down with a bout of debilitating stomach pain after checking into a hotel in C City during a business trip. The pain is so horrific that Yang Wei passes out, awakening three days later to find two female employees from the hotel taking him to the hospital. From there, Han Song takes us on a Kafkaesque journey where the protagonist undergoes countless tests, procedures, and operations. He is sent from one wing of the hospital to another, waiting in long lines, vying for the attention of any one of the mysterious doctors who inhabit the hospital, and yet seemingly unable to get any information, let alone a diagnosis. The longer he stays in the hospital the more lost he becomes, until reality itself seems to unravel around him and he descends into a labyrinthine nightmare of the strange.

Translating the trilogy has fully consumed, even haunted me, since 2020. Reading it is a challenging experience and certainly not for everyone. The series contains frequent descriptions of pain, rape, murder, suicide, and cannibalism, but even more disturbing, in a way, is its unconventional use of language, unusual structure, and shifting perspectives (Hospital is written in third person, Exorcism in first person, and Dead Souls in second). It contains dense references to medical terminology, scientific history, Buddhism, Christianity, Japanese pop culture, and classic literature and philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kafka and Sartre, with plenty of veiled references to the political reality of contemporary China along the way. The series is categorized as “science fiction” by booksellers in China and abroad, but that is misleading. For a while, I described it as a mash-up between science fiction, horror, suspense, social realism, and avant-garde literature; think a hallucinogenic David Cronenberg film written by Franz Kafka and set during a Chinese politburo meeting. But I’m not sure if even that description does the series justice. Over the past three years, as I have slowly worked through the translation, my understanding of the series has evolved. I am always discovering new layers of meaning hidden within the book’s devilishly complex narrative.

1.

This past fall, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In December, I attended a traditional Norwegian brunch and live stream of Fosse’s Nobel lecture at the Norwegian consul general’s residence in New York City.

At the time, I’d only read Melancholy, Fosse’s 1995 novel about a grandiose and possibly ephebophilic painter who ends up in the asylum. I had no idea, at the time, how intensely Septology, his recent seven-volume epic, set over the seven days leading up to Christmas—the same seven days, in the liturgical calendar, as it so happened, that I’d end up reading it—would hit me. That it would serve as a guidebook, a religious text, a light over the darkest week of the year.

Septology follows Asle, an aging painter and widower living in Dylgja, on Norway’s western coast, as he prepares for his annual Christmas exhibit in the nearby town Bjørgvin. He lives alone, doesn’t drink or smoke, and is a practicing Catholic. His social circle is limited to Åsleik, his neighbor and friend; Beyer, the gallerist who shows his paintings; and Ales, his long-deceased wife, with whom he still speaks every day. Each volume starts with Asle contemplating a painting he’s just painted, a blank canvas with two strokes forming a cross; each volume ends with Asle praying the rosary.

My first brush with Derpycon lore—and by lore I mean its legally enforced code of conduct—was a scroll through its extensive weapons policy.

“LIVE STEEL,” the website went, “is defined as bayonets, shuriken, star knives, metal armor—including chain mail.” Studs on clothing constituted a fringe case, subject to approval by convention staff. This precaution was not due to fear of terrorist attacks but to the preponderance of weapon-wielding anime characters, a popular costume choice among attendees. The rules, I imagined, had been set in response to years of disastrous horseplay, yaoi paddle hazing rituals, and airsoft-gun-as-ray-gun mishaps. Thankfully everyone on the registration line ahead of me had gotten the memo, and their cardboard scythes buckled innocuously.

Derpycon was billed as a three-day, all-ages, “multi-genre” anime, gaming, sci-fi, and comics convention for nerds of all stripes. It boasted “panels, concerts, video gaming, cosplay, vendors, dances, LARPs, artists, and so much more.” The branding this year aligned the convention with the conventional definition of derpyness, meme-speak for bumbling or awkwardness, rather than the more controversial Derpy, a cross-eyed background character from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Any catering to the controversial “brony” (adult male fans of My Little Pony) set would have surprised me. Instead, images proliferated of mishaps: someone running late for the train with a slice of toast in their mouth and “under construction” imagery (the convention’s mascot is the Derpycone). The provisional or half-baked aspects of the con would therefore feel on-brand. The press pass I received contained a charming illustration of a blushing man struggling to stop a train with a large wooden beam in his arms.

While Derpycon serves many fans, its clear focus is the otaku, or zealous consumers of Japanese popular media. I’d count myself among them, although my own relationship with J-pop became complicated during art school. Like most young illustrators—likely including more than a few teens here in attendance—I first learned to draw in an anime-influenced style that my professors, considering it juvenile, forbade. I adopted it both to spite them and hedge my bets commercially, with mixed success. Now some illustration clients request the anime/manga aesthetic while para-academic institutions still shun it, and AI does it exponentially better than I ever could.

When these conventions started, much of Japanese animation could only reach the U.S. via a niche VHS pipeline, but today the look is arguably the most popular figurative aesthetic worldwide. The casual fanbase is much larger, and the convergence with fine art and high fashion is pervasive, yet the otaku world retains some vestige of insularity and self-consciousness. (Hence the pejorative weeaboo or weeb for its more dedicated constituents—the kinds of hardcore fans lining up sheepishly beside me for weapons inspection.)

I climbed the stairs two at a time. I no longer know what I was thinking about in that stairwell, I imagine I was counting the steps so as not to think of anything else.

I arrived at the door, caught my breath and rang the bell. The man approached from the other side, I could hear him, I could make out his footsteps on the wooden floor.

***

I’d first met him on the Internet just two hours earlier. He was the one who’d contacted me. He’d told me he liked boys like me, young, slender, blond, blue-eyed—the Aryan type, he’d insisted. He’d asked me to dress like a student and that’s what I’d done—at least his idea of a student—with an oversized hoodie I’d borrowed from Geoffroy and sky-blue trainers, my favorites, I’d done what he wanted because I was hoping he’d reward my efforts and pay me more than he’d promised.

I’ve noticed that a striking number of the best children’s books have been written by people who had no children: Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon). H. A. and Margret Rey (Curious George). Maurice Sendak. Dr. Seuss.

I have a theory as to why. If you don’t have kids, you can only really experience the book from the child’s point of view. Parents can’t help but have all kinds of agendas when they read a book to their child. And who can blame them? As long as the child is a captive audience, why not teach them about something? Like patience, or the alphabet, or Who Simone Biles Is?

The best children’s books teach none of that. They aren’t advertisements for anything—not even the important things. They’re an advertisement for reading itself; for the entertainment value of the world itself. 

Consider Curious George. The first book in the series is a full-scale assault on the senses of young children with a relentless barrage of every thrilling and dangerous thing that primally fascinates them. On successive pages in a single book, George is kidnapped (from a jungle); goes on a boat; calls 911; gets a visit from the entire fire department; then is arrested by the police for placing the call; goes to jail; then escapes jail—by flying high above the city, carried by a bunch of balloons. These things happen in the same book, in a row. It is hard to imagine a responsible parent dreaming up such a sequence at bedtime, let alone a sequel (Curious George Takes a Job) in which George explores a hospital unsupervised and passes out in bliss from inhaling ether. 

Greg Johnson and Joyce Carol Oates have been corresponding since 1975, when he wrote her a letter about a professor of his who had committed suicide and she responded. He wrote to her occasionally over the following years, mostly about her writing, and then eventually his. Their back-and-forth became a friendship, led to a biography Johnson published in 1998, and continued after. “Inadvertently, unwittingly, through the years Greg and I seem to have composed a kind of double portrait that, at the outset, in 1975, neither of us could possibly have imagined; nor could I have imagined that Greg would be my primary correspondent through most of my adult life,” Oates writes in her introduction to a selection of these letters, which will be published in March. The letters provide, as the best ones do, flashes of dailiness that build up over decades into something more substantive. The Review is publishing several,  from 1995, below.

January 25, 1995

Dear Greg,

I’m enclosing the London Review since they’ve sent me several extra copies, and I thought you might find the publication attractive. It’s a junior version of New York Review—each review much shorter, but approximately the same quality. Elaine [Showalter] often publishes here.

Read Diane Oliver’s short story “No Brown Sugar in Anybody’s Milk,” published in the Summer 2023 issue of the Review.

A year ago, I had never heard of the astounding short story artist Diane Oliver. This admission is embarrassing, as I am a novelist and professor. Furthermore, Oliver and I have a number of shared characteristics. We both are Black, Southern, daughters of educators, graduates of women’s colleges, and we both attended the University of Iowa. Born in 1943—the same year as my mother—she was a generation ahead of me, paving the way. Yet, somehow, I had never come across her work, not even at Spelman College, where Black women’s writing is the core of the English major. Initially, I blamed myself. Why had I not been more diligent as a graduate student? Oliver published four stories in her lifetime, and two posthumously. Her work appeared in Negro Digest, Sewanee Review, and was reprinted in the anthology Right On!. In other words, Neighbors was hiding in plain sight. After more thinking, I faulted the gatekeepers—whoever they may be—for not including Oliver in the anthologies that form the curriculum of writing programs. But after a while I grew tired of wondering why and chose to celebrate the discovery.

I encountered Neighbors in a most unusual manner. I received a copy printed on plain paper, no intriguing cover, no laudatory blurbs from great writers, not even a paragraph from the publisher providing context or summary. I knew only that the author was a Black woman and the manuscript was slated for publication. The bound stack was simply labeled “Neighbors.” I could have asked for more information or done a quick Google search. Instead, I recognized the opportunity for what it was: a chance to let the words introduce me to the work of Diane Oliver.

This breathtaking collection of short stories is a marvel. When I was a young writer, I remember receiving this advice from one of my peers: “Imagine that the world as we know it is over. Now imagine the people of the future trying to sort out the wreckage. Well, that’s what books are for—to let the new people know what the hell happened.” I had almost forgotten that scrap of undergraduate wisdom until I read the first few pages of this book. Neighbors evokes the feeling of sorting through a time capsule sealed and buried in the yard of a Southern African Methodist Episcopal church in the early sixties. The political issues of the day—namely racial integration—permeate the narratives, as this is this most significant social shift since emancipation. Oliver explores the changing America while beautifully documenting the culture of Black Americans living in the South. She remembers the domestic workers who leave their own children home alone to keep house for rich white folks. Boy coats with raccoon collars were all the rage for the wealthy, while poor folks took pride that their simple clothes were cleaned and ironed. “Up North” and “Chicago” are both shorthand for a promised land where a person could earn a decent wage and send her children to college. This is Oliver’s world, and she shines a light in every corner.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nadja Küchenmeister’s “feathers and planets,” translated by Aimee Chor, appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246. Here, we asked both Küchenmeister and Chor to reflect on their work.

1. Nadja Küchenmeister

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The poem began, as it often does for me, with an image (“sugar, stirred into cream”) and at the same time a rhythmic set of sounds that, ideally, make a phrase into verse. I like tonal neighborhoods that are not immediately apparent but rather reveal themselves in the writing of a poem (in German, the words Einkaufsnetz [shopping bag] and Bett [bed] make a tonal connection, as do, more distantly, Netz [net] and Fuchs [fox]—at least to my ear). However, these resonances, these rhymes, have to emerge on their own—I cannot force them. They establish themselves on the basis of something that was already present in the poem. You could also say that something only comes to be because something else came into being before it. This is true for images and motifs and for sounds as well. In this sense, a poem always also creates itself, although of course I am the one who gives it its order.