Which novel by Barbara Kingsolver won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023?

Which novel by Barbara Kingsolver won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023? The answer is Demon Copperhead.

Published in 2022, Demon Copperhead is Kingsolver’s Appalachian reimagining of Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel David Copperfield. Its narrator, Damon “Demon” Fields, grows up in poverty in rural Virginia and confronts foster care, school struggles, opioid addiction, and the failures of social institutions.

The Pulitzer citation praised the novel’s portrayal of an Appalachian boy facing poverty, addiction, and institutional collapse. Kingsolver’s book shared the 2023 Fiction prize with Hernan Diaz’s Trust, an unusual joint award rather than a sole winner.

A common mix-up is The Poisonwood Bible, another Kingsolver novel and a 1999 Pulitzer finalist, not the winner. The Overstory, by Richard Powers, won in 2019, while The Lacuna did not win the Fiction prize.