Louise Erdrich has won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 2020 novel, The Night Watchman. The Pulitzer committee described the book as “a majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.

The two finalists were A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason (Little, Brown and Company)Telephone, by Percival Everett (Graywolf Press).

This is Erdrich’s first Pulitzer, although her 2009 novel, A Plague of Doves, was a finalist. In April, The Night Watchman won the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Erdrich has won or been a finalist for all of the major literary awards.

The Round House (2012) won the National Book Award, while The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the NBA in 2001.

Both her 1983 debut, Love Medicine, and LaRose (2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award. A Plague of Doves won the 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize. In 2014 she received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. And in 2015 she won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.