This year’s Pulitzer winners include the New York Times and ProPublica as well as authors including Jayne Anne Phillips and Jonathan Eig.
The Pulitzers honored the best in journalism from 2023 in 15 categories, as well as eight arts categories focused on books, music and theater. The public service winner receives a gold medal. All other winners receive $15,000.
The Associated Press won a Pulitzer prize in feature photography for its coverage of global migration through Latin America to the US while the New York Times and Reuters news service each won Pulitzers for their coverage of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath.
The Pulitzers’ prestigious award in public service went to ProPublica for reporting that “pierced the thick wall of secrecy” around the US supreme court to show how billionaires gave gifts and travel to justices.
The Pulitzers also issued special citations to journalists and writers covering the war in Gaza, and to the late hip-hop critic Greg Tate.
The staff of the New York Times won for its “wide-ranging and revelatory coverage” of Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, the intelligence failures by Israel and the country’s response in Gaza.
The Times’s Hannah Dreier won a Pulitzer in investigative reporting for her stories on migrant child labor across the United States. The contributing writer Katie Engelhart won the newspaper’s third Pulitzer, in feature writing, for her portrait of a family struggling with a matriarch’s dementia.
The Washington Post staff won in national reporting for its “sobering examination” of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which came with some gut-wrenching photos. The Post’s David E Hoffman won in editorial writing for a “compelling and well-researched” series on how authoritarian regimes repress dissent in the digital age. Its third award went to contributor Vladimir Kara-Murza, for commentaries written from a Russian prison cell.
The public service award honored the ProPublica reporters Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski and Kirsten Berg, whose stories prompted the supreme court to adopt its first code of conduct.
The New Yorker magazine won two Pulitzers. Sarah Stillman won in explanatory reporting for her report on the legal system’s reliance on felony murder charges. Medar de la Cruz, a contributor, won in illustrated reporting and commentary for his story humanizing inmates in the Rikers Island jail in New York City.
Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch, a mother-daughter saga set in a West Virginia asylum after the civil war, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The drama prize was awarded to Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust, about a bookstore worker’s unexpected journey after he loses his job.
Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy won for general nonfiction, and Jacqueline Jones received the history prize for No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era.
Two winners were announced on Monday in the biography category: Jonathan Eig for his Martin Luther King biography King: A Life and Ilyon Woo for Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom. Cristina Rivera Garza’s investigation into the murder of her sister, Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, won for memoir-autobiography, while Brandon Som’s Tripas received the poetry prize.
Tyshawn Sorey’s saxophone concerto Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) was the winner for music.
The Pulitzers are administered by Columbia University in New York, which itself has been in the news for student demonstrations against the war in Gaza. The Pulitzer board met away from Columbia this past weekend to deliberate on its winners.