Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
Fiction
1976 Massacre at Fall Creek by Jessamyn West
Narrates the reactions of a small 1824 Indian settlement to the capture, trial, conviction and execution of five white men for the premeditated murder of nine peaceful men, women and children of the Seneca tribe.
1978 Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Describes a youth's breakdown and recovery and how it affects his family.
1979 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
In Toni Morrison's powerful 1977 novel, Milkman Dead hears a strange story: his father and his aunt Pilate witnessed their father's murder, and Pilate has carried his bones around with her for 20 years. Milkman travels south to find that this grandfather (who fled slavery and escaped, creating a myth of flight) has been immortalized in folktales and songs. He and Pilate bury his bones at last, and Milkman is made free and powerful by his newfound connection to his ancestors. Winner of the 1978 National Book Critics Award.
1980 Final Payments by Mary Gordon
Isabel Moore, a 30-year-old woman who has spent all her adult life caring for a bedridden father, tries to make a new life after his death. However, the guilt engendered by her strict Catholic upbringing undermines her efforts until, in the end, she finally finds the strength to throw off her loveless background and act on her own behalf.
1981 Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud
An imaginative reconstruction of the 38-year love affair between Thomas Jefferson and a slave woman on his plantation.
1982 Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler
One of Tyler's perennial eccentric Baltimoreans, a middle-aged hardware clerk named Morgan Gower, leaves his wife and seven children to seek some sort of satisfaction in the company of two troubled newlyweds.
1983 The Company Of Women by Mary Gordon
"A superb, stunningly written novel." The Philadelphia Inquirer
Raised by five intensely religious women and a charismatic, controversial priest, sheltered from the secular world, Felicitas Maria Taylor is intelligent, charming, and desperate for a taste of ordinary happiness. More freedom than she has ever imagined awaits her at Columbia University in the 1960s. There, Felicitas falls in love with the worst man for her -- with shattering results. Now she must turn again to the company of the women who love her as she struggles to embrace the future without betraying the past.
1984 The Killing Ground by Mary Lee SettleRaised by five intensely religious women and a charismatic, controversial priest, sheltered from the secular world, Felicitas Maria Taylor is intelligent, charming, and desperate for a taste of ordinary happiness. More freedom than she has ever imagined awaits her at Columbia University in the 1960s. There, Felicitas falls in love with the worst man for her -- with shattering results. Now she must turn again to the company of the women who love her as she struggles to embrace the future without betraying the past.
In this concluding volume of Settle's "Beulah Quintet,"the narrator, Hannah McKarkle, reveals herself as the author of the preceding four volumes. This novel brings the series into the present and examines the reason for Hannah's tracing of her family's history: her need to make sense of her brother Johnny's violent death in jail.
1985 During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
A panoramic account of the trials, tribulations, challenges, and joys shared by generations of one of Ohio's leading families, dominated by the resilient Lil Bradley, their own Queen of Persia.
1986 Civil Wars by Rosellen Brown
An idealistic couple, Teddy and Jessie Carlls, former activists in the civil rights movement in the 1960s and deeply committed to racial tolerance and equality, live with their children as virtually the only whites in a black development. When Teddy's racist sister and her husband are killed in an automobile accident, the Carlls are named as guardians of their two children--budding racists in their own right--and the expanded family finds it necessary to move. Teddy and Jessie reluctantly move to a larger house in a white, middle-class neighborhood. The novel focuses on Jessie's desperate efforts to help her in-laws' children adjust both to their loss and to the atmosphere of racial tolerance the children must confront in their new family.
1987 Always Coming Home/Paperback Book and Cassette by Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, Todd Barton, George Hersh
An experimental novel that urges readers to take a more active role by creating the parts of the story themselves. Le Guin provides pieces of the story, and, from those raw materials, the reader constructs the rest. Moreover, in "Always Coming Home", the beginning is arbitrary--there is a thematic center to the novel, and the narrative branches out in many directions from the center. It includes poems, plays, short stories, commentary, music, recipes, essays, and information about the fictional Kesh tribe in article-glossary format. This book is a multimedia product--including pictures, text, and a cassette featuring music and spoken word--and was created about ten years before CD-ROM technology filtered down to a mass audience.
1989 A Southern Family by Gail Godwin
A violent death precipitates change in a troubled North Carolina family.
1991 John Dollar by Marianne Wiggins
Charlotte Lewes's husband was killed in World War I, and she seeks a new life in Rangoon as a teacher. Then she meets John Dollar, and is stranded with him and eight of her young pupils on a menacing island.
1992 Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei Yamashita
A multigenerational novel describing the adventures of a group of Japanese immigrants who attempt to create a utopia in the Brazilian rain forest.
1995 Taft by Ann Patchett
This novel tells the simple story of a man's intense desire to be reunited with his son. John Nickel is a Black musician in Memphis. A protective man by nature, he sympathizes with Carl and Fay Taft, a young white brother and sister who seek work at his blues bar. Despite the trouble they cause him, the pity they induce in him helps him to define his morals. The narration is in Nickel's voice, alternating between the dark events of the story and his imagination.
1996 The Instinct for Bliss by Melissa Pritchard
Twelve stories by a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award in 1987.
1997 The Book of Mercy by Kathleen Cambor
A retired fireman, tortured by the disappearance of his flamboyant wife, becomes obsessed with the art of alchemy--the science of transmuting base metals into gold. This novel was a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and a "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year.