Who wrote Night Watch, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?

Jayne Anne Phillips wrote Night Watch, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The novel is set in West Virginia after the American Civil War and follows survivors whose lives are shaped by violence, displacement, and trauma. Phillips draws on the region’s history and landscape to explore how people rebuild families after conflict.

Night Watch won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The award recognized Phillips’s literary achievement, and the book also received attention for its compressed historical setting and psychologically intense characters. The title can cause confusion because several unrelated books and films are called Night Watch; this Pulitzer-winning work is specifically Phillips’s historical novel.

Phillips had previously published several acclaimed novels and short-story collections, including Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite. Night Watch became her first Pulitzer winner. Readers often connect it with other post–Civil War American fiction, but its focus is the intimate experience of a small group of people rather than a broad military history.