Public radio’s This American Life won the first Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting, for an episode they did in partnership with the category’s two other winners, the Los Angeles Times and Vice News.
The episode, The Out Crowd, was recognized for “revelatory, intimate journalism that illuminates the personal impact of the Trump Administration’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy.” The Pulitzers recognized Molly O’Toole, immigration and security reporter in the Times’ Washington bureau, and Emily Green, a journalist based in Mexico City.
In the drama category, the Pulitzer committee recognized A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson. The musical “tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities,” the judges wrote.
In the music category, Anthony Davis won for The Central Park Five, which premiered last year at the Long Beach Opera. The judges called it a “courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful.”
Colson Whitehead, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Underground Railroad in 2017, won the top fiction honor again for The Nickel Boys. The committee called it “a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.”
Here is a complete list of the 2020 winners:
JOURNALISM
Public Service
The Anchorage Daily News, in collaboration with ProPublica
Breaking News Reporting
Staff of The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky.
Investigative Reporting
Brian M. Rosenthal of The New York Times
Explanatory Reporting
Staff of The Washington Post
Local Reporting
Staff of The Baltimore Sun
National Reporting
T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi of ProPublica
and
Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, Mike Baker and Lewis Kamb of The Seattle Times
International Reporting
Staff of The New York Times
Feature Writing
Ben Taub of The New Yorker
Commentary
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times
Criticism
Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times
Editorial Writing
Jeffery Gerritt of the Palestine (Tx.) Herald-Press
Editorial Cartooning
Barry Blitt, contributor, The New Yorker
Breaking News Photography
Photography Staff of Reuters
Feature Photography
Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin of the Associated Press
Audio Reporting
Staff of This American Life with Molly O’Toole of the Los Angeles Times and Emily Green, freelancer for Vice News for “The Out Crowd”
LETTERS AND DRAMA
Fiction
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
Drama
A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson
History
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel (Oxford University Press)
Biography
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Poetry
The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)
General Nonfiction
The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
and
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)
MUSIC
The Central Park Five by Anthony Davis, premiered by Long Beach Opera on June 15, 2019
SPECIAL CITATION
Ida B. Wells
