The Pulitzer Prize officials have announced this year's winners, with the fiction award going to Daniel Kraus for his novel Angel Down, a First World War narrative told in a single sentence. The drama prize was awarded to Bess Wohl for Liberation, a play reflecting on feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s.
Historical Works Recognized
Two books rooted in the founding of the United States were among the winners. Jill Lepore's We the People: A History of the US Constitution won the history prize, while Amanda Vaill's Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution was awarded the biography prize.
Other Notable Winners
Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow, a candid account of her two sons' suicides, won the memoir-autobiography category. Brian Goldstone's There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America took the general nonfiction prize. The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr for 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.
Daniel Kraus: A Diverse Career
The 50-year-old Kraus has had a prolific career spanning fantasy, horror, and young adult novels, including collaborations with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Pulitzer officials praised Angel Down as a stylistic tour-de-force blending allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.
Bess Wohl's Liberation
Wohl's memory play features second-wave feminists from various backgrounds as they confront misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse, and gender roles. The play shifts between past and present, with six actors disrobing for the act two opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony award nominations, where Liberation is expected to be named in the best new play category.
The Guardian's Adrian Horton praised Liberation in a four-star review, noting: "The play offers no concrete answers; one's personal politics and choices remain, as ever, a thicket of contradictions. Liberation finds, in that, an immutable and potent grief – for the costs of our failings, for all that's been lost, for the questions we thought too late to ask. But that doesn't mean, as this provocative play suggests, that we shouldn't still ask them."
