The Pulitzer Prize for fiction has been awarded to Daniel Kraus, an author known for fantasy, horror, and young adult novels, for his World War I narrative, Angel Down, notably told in a single, continuous sentence. Bess Wohl's Liberation, exploring 1970s feminist consciousness-raising groups, secured the drama prize.
Kraus, 50, boasts a diverse career, including collaborations with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. The Pulitzer committee lauded Angel Down as "a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence."
Wohl's memory play gathers diverse second-wave feminists to confront misogyny, internalised homophobia, domestic abuse, and gender roles. Moving between past and present, six actors disrobe during the opening scene of Act 2. This win comes just ahead of the Tony Award nominations, where Liberation is widely tipped for a best new play nomination.
Other literary accolades included Jill Lepore's We the People: A History of the US Constitution for history, and Amanda Vaill's Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution in biography. Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow, a candid account of her two sons' suicides, was recognised for memoir-autobiography, while Brian Goldstone's There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America won for general nonfiction. The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr's Ars Poeticas, and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for Picaflor: A Future Myth, a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.
Meanwhile, the Minnesota Star Tribune's coverage of last year's mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school took the Pulitzer Prize on Monday for breaking news. Judges praised the "thoroughness and compassion" of the newspaper's reporting on a scene of carnage in its hometown. Two children were killed and more than a dozen others were injured as the shooter opened fire during the school's first Mass of the academic year. The shooter was later found dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot.
Separately, The Associated Press secured the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for its investigative series on the expansion of government surveillance in China and the involvement of US technology firms. The Pulitzer board specifically acknowledged AP journalists Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau, and Aniruddha Ghosal, alongside independent contributor Yael Grauer. Their work was lauded as "an astonishing global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance," which also encompassed a report on the US Border Patrol's expanded use of license plate surveillance on drivers across the United States.
