The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize is a literary prize created in 1988 by the newspaper The Chicago Tribune. It is awarded yearly in two categories: Fiction and Nonfiction. These prizes are awarded to books that "reinforce and perpetuate the values of heartland America."
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize — Fiction
2019: Rebecca Makkai for The Great Believers
2018: George Saunders, for Lincoln in the Bardo
2017: Colson Whitehead, for The Underground Railroad
2016: Jane Smiley, for Golden Age
2015: Chang-rae Lee, for On Such a Full Sea
2014: Daniel Woodrell, for The Maid's Version
2013: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for Americanah
2012: Richard Ford, for Canada
2011: Jonathan Franzen, for Freedom
2010: E. O. Wilson, for Anthill
2009: Jayne Anne Phillips, for Lark and Termite
2008: Aleksandar Hemon, for The Lazarus Project
2007: Robert Olmstead, for Coal Black Horse
2006: Louise Erdrich, for The Painted Drum
2005: Marilynne Robinson, for Gilead
2004: Ward Just, for An Unfinished Season
2003: Scott Turow, for Reversible Errors
2002: Alice Sebold, for The Lovely Bones
2001: Mona Simpson, for Off Keck Road
2000: Jeffery Renard Allen, for Rails Under My Back
1999: Elizabeth Strout, for Amy and Isabelle
1998: Jane Hamilton, for The Short History of a Prince
1997: Charles Frazier, for Cold Mountain
1996: Antonya Nelson, for Talking in Bed
1995: William Maxwell, for All The Days and Nights
1994: Maxine Clair, for Rattlebone
1993: Annie Proulx, for The Shipping News
1992: Jane Smiley, for A Thousand Acres
1991: Kaye Gibbons, for A Cure For Dreams
1990: Tim O'Brien, for The Things They Carried
1989: Ward Just, for Jack Gance
1988: Eric Larsen, for An American Memory
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize — Nonfiction
2019: Sarah Smarsh, for Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth 2018: Caroline Fraser, for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder 2017: Matthew Desmond, for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City 2016: Margo Jefferson, for Negroland: A Memoir 2015: Danielle Allen, for Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality 2014: Jesmyn Ward, for Men We Reaped 2013: Thomas Dyja, for The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream 2012: Paul Hendrickson, for Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 2011: Isabel Wilkerson, for The Warmth of Other Suns 2010: Rebecca Skloot for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 2009: Nick Reding, for Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town 2008: Garry Wills, for Head and Heart: American Christianities and What the Gospels Meant 2007: Orville Vernon Burton, for The Age of Lincoln 2006: Taylor Branch, for At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 2005: Kevin Boyle, for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age 2004: Ann Patchett, for Truth & Beauty: A Friendship 2003: Paul Hendrickson, for Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy 2002: Studs Terkel, for Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith 2001: Louis Menand, for The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America 2000: Zachary Karabell, for The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election 1999: Jay Parini for Robert Frost: A Life 1998: Alex Kotlowitz, for The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, A Death, and America's Dilemma 1997: Thomas Lynch, for The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade 1996: Jonathan Harr, for A Civil Action 1995: Richard Stern, for A Sistermony 1994: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for Colored People: A Memoir 1993: Norman Maclean, for Young Men and Fire 1992: Melissa Fay Greene, for Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Non-Fiction 1991: William Cronon, for Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West 1990: Michael Dorris, for The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome 1989: Joseph Epstein, for Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives 1988: Don Katz, for The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears