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Here are the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes

Published

2 years ago

May 7, 2024

Here are the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes

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The Pulitzer Prizes were awarded today at Columbia University, honoring American achievements in journalism, letters and drama, and music. Widely recognized as the most prestigious awards in their field within the United States, the 108th Pulitzer Prizes took place against an unusually fraught backdrop. In a statement last week, the Pulitzer Board commended student journalists covering campus protests against the war in Gaza, acknowledging they were often placing themselves “in the face of great personal and academic risk.”

Twenty-three prizes were awarded last year, with cash prizes of $15,000 going to the recipients of most of the prizes and a gold medal to the news organization that wins the Public Service Prize.

The New York Times won one of its three Pulitzers this year for its coverage of the war in Gaza. The award for International Reporting went to its staff for “wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza.” The Times also took Pulitzers in the Features and Investigative categories, the latter for a series by Hannah Dreier that revealed “the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States – and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.”

The Washington Post tied with the Times with three wins in the categories of Commentary, Editorial Writing and National Reporting. It shared the last with the staff at Reuters, which also won a Pulitzer for Breaking News Photography, for “raw and urgent photographs documenting the October 7th deadly attack in Israel by Hamas and the first weeks of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza.”

And film critic Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times won a Criticism Pulitzer for “richly evocative and genre-spanning” work “that reflects on the contemporary moviegoing experience.” Chang also contributes to numerous other publications, including NPR.

In arts and letters, the Biography award was given to two authors. The judges called Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life, a revelatory portrait of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Ilyon Woo also won a Biography Pulitzer for Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom.

The Fiction Pulitzer went to West Virginia writer Jayne Anne Phillips for her novel Night Watch. It’s about a traumatized family in the aftermath of the Civil War. And the Nonfiction prize went to A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall. The treatment of a grieving Palestinian father was described by the judges as a “finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank.”

Here are the 2024 winners:

Prizes in Journalism

Public Service
“Awarded to ProPublica for the work of Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski and Kirsten Berg, groundbreaking and ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court to reveal how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel, pushing the Court to adopt its first code of conduct.”

Breaking News Reporting
“Awarded to the Staff of Lookout Santa Cruz, California, for its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage, over a holiday weekend, of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses.”

Investigative Reporting
“Awarded to Hannah Dreier of The New York Times for a deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States – and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.”

Explanatory Reporting
“Awarded to Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker for a searing indictment of our legal system’s reliance on the felony murder charge and its disparate consequences, often devastating for communities of color.”

Local Reporting
“Awarded to Sarah Conway of City Bureau and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute for their investigative series on missing Black girls and women in Chicago that revealed how systemic racism and police department neglect contributed to the crisis.”

National Reporting
“Awarded to the Staff of Reuters for an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.”

“Awarded to the Staff of The Washington Post for its sobering examination of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which forced readers to reckon with the horrors wrought by the weapon often used for mass shootings in America. (Moved by the Board from the Public Service category, where it also was entered and nominated.)”

International Reporting
“Awarded to the Staff of The New York Times for its wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza.”

Feature Writing
“Awarded to Katie Engelhart, contributing writer, The New York Times for her fair-minded portrait of a family’s legal and emotional struggles during a matriarch’s progressive dementia that sensitively probes the mystery of a person’s essential self.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza in Moscow on Feb. 22, 2024.

Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

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Vladimir Kara-Murza in Moscow on Feb. 22, 2024.

Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary
“Awarded to Vladimir Kara-Murza, contributor, The Washington Post for passionate columns written at great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country.”

Criticism
“Awarded to Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times for richly evocative and genre-spanning film criticism that reflects on the contemporary moviegoing experience.”

Editorial Writing
“Awarded to David E. Hoffman of The Washington Post for a compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age, and how they can be fought.”

Illustrated Reporting and Commentary
“Awarded to Medar de la Cruz, contributor, The New Yorker for his visually-driven story set inside Rikers Island jail using bold black-and-white images that humanize the prisoners and staff through their hunger for books.”

Breaking News Photography
“Awarded to the Photography Staff of Reuters for raw and urgent photographs documenting the October 7th deadly attack in Israel by Hamas and the first weeks of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza.”

Haitian migrants wade through water as they cross the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama on May 9, 2023.

Ivan Valencia/AP

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Haitian migrants wade through water as they cross the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama on May 9, 2023.

Ivan Valencia/AP

Feature Photography
“Awarded to the Photography Staff of Associated Press for poignant photographs chronicling unprecedented masses of migrants and their arduous journey north from Colombia to the border of the United States.”

Audio Reporting
“Awarded to the Staffs of the Invisible Institute, Chicago, and USG Audio, California, for a powerful series that revisits a Chicago hate crime from the 1990s, a fluid amalgam of memoir, community history and journalism.”

Letters and Drama Prizes

Fiction
“Awarded to Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf), a beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.”

Drama
“Awarded to Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth, a simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community.”

History
“Awarded to No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era, by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books), a breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.”

Biography
“Awarded to King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life, exploring his strengths and weaknesses, including the self-questioning and depression that accompanied his determination.”

“Awarded to Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster), a rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters.”

Memoir or Autobiography
“Awarded to Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice, by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth), a genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss.”

Poetry
“Awarded to Tripas: Poems, by Brandon Som (Georgia Review Books), a collection that deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict.”

General Nonfiction
“Awarded to A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books), a finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations.”

Prize in Music
“Awarded to ‘Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)’ by Tyshawn Sorey, premiered on March 16, 2023 at Atlanta Symphony Hall, an introspective saxophone concerto with a wide range of textures presented in a slow tempo, a beautiful homage that’s quietly intense, treasuring intimacy rather than spectacle.”

Special Citations
“The Pulitzer Board awards a special citation for the late writer and critic Greg Tate, whose language – cribbed from literature, academia, popular culture and hip-hop – was as influential as the content of his ideas. His aesthetic, innovations and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering hip-hop criticism, continue to influence subsequent generations, especially writers and critics of color.

In recent years the Pulitzer Board has issued citations honoring journalists covering wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan. This year, the Board recognizes the courageous work of journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza. Under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and others in Gaza. This war has also claimed the lives of poets and writers among the casualties. As the Pulitzer Prizes honor categories of journalism, arts, and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.”

Lifestyle

Video: Prada Peels Back the Layers at Milan Fashion Week

Published

2 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Video: Prada Peels Back the Layers at Milan Fashion Week

new video loaded: Prada Peels Back the Layers at Milan Fashion Week

At Milan Fashion Week, Prada showcased a collection built on layering. For the models, it was like shedding a skin each of the four times they strutted down the runway, revealing a new look with each cycle.

By Chevaz Clarke and Daniel Fetherston

February 27, 2026

Lifestyle

Bill Cosby Rape Accuser Donna Motsinger Says He Won’t Testify At Trial

Published

3 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Bill Cosby Rape Accuser Donna Motsinger Says He Won’t Testify At Trial

Bill Cosby
Rape Accuser Says Cosby Won’t Take Stand At Trial

Published
February 27, 2026
5:45 PM PST

Bill Cosby‘s rape accuser Donna Motsinger says the TV star can’t be bothered to show up to court for a trial in a lawsuit she filed against him.

According to new legal docs, obtained by TMZ. Motsinger says Bill will not testify in court … she claims it’s “because he does not care to appear.”

Donna Motsinger

Motsinger says Bill won’t show his face at the trial either … and the only time the jury will hear from him will be a previously taped deposition.

As we previously reported, Motsinger claims Bill drugged and raped her in 1972. In the case, Bill admitted during a deposition that he obtained a recreational prescription for Quaaludes that he secured from a gynecologist at a poker game.

TMZ.com

Bill also said he planned to use the pills to give to women in the hopes of having sex with them.

Motsinger alleged Bill gave her a pill that she thought was aspirin. She claimed she felt off after taking it and said she woke up the next day in her bed with only her underwear on.

Here, it sounds like Motsinger wants to play the deposition for the jury.

Lifestyle

Baz Luhrmann will make you fall in love with Elvis Presley

Published

14 hours ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

Baz Luhrmann will make you fall in love with Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in Aug. 1970.

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“You are my favorite customer,” Baz Luhrmann tells me on a recent Zoom call from the sunny Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. The director is on a worldwide blitz to promote his new film, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert — which opens wide this week — and he says this, not to flatter me, but because I’ve just called his film a miracle.

See, I’ve never cared a lick about Elvis Presley, who would have turned 91 in January, had he not died in 1977 at the age of 42. Never had an inkling to listen to his music, never seen any of his films, never been interested in researching his life or work. For this millennial, Presley was a fossilized, mummified relic from prehistory — like a woolly mammoth stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits — and I was mostly indifferent about seeing 1970s concert footage when I sat down for an early IMAX screening of EPiC.

By the end of its rollicking, exhilarating 90 minutes, I turned to my wife and said, “I think I’m in love with Elvis Presley.”

“I’m not trying to sell Elvis,” Luhrmann clarifies. “But I do think that the most gratifying thing is when someone like you has the experience you’ve had.”

Elvis made much more of an imprint on a young Luhrmann; he watched the King’s movies while growing up in New South Wales, Australia in the 1960s, and he stepped to 1972’s “Burning Love” as a young ballroom dancer. But then, like so many others, he left Elvis behind. As a teenager, “I was more Bowie and, you know, new wave and Elton and all those kinds of musical icons,” he says. “I became a big opera buff.”

Luhrmann only returned to the King when he decided to make a movie that would take a sweeping look at America in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s — which became his 2022 dramatized feature, Elvis, starring Austin Butler. That film, told in the bedazzled, kaleidoscopic style that Luhrmann is famous for, cast Presley as a tragic figure; it was framed and narrated by Presley’s notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, portrayed by a conniving and heavily made-up Tom Hanks. The dark clouds of business exploitation, the perils of fame, and an early demise hang over the singer’s heady rise and fall.

In 'Elvis,' an icon remains an icon, and little else

It was a divisive movie. Some praised Butler’s transformative performance and the director’s ravishing style; others experienced it as a nauseating 2.5-hour trailer. Reviewing it for Fresh Air, Justin Chang said that “Luhrmann’s flair for spectacle tends to overwhelm his basic story sense,” and found the framing device around Col. Parker (and Hanks’ “uncharacteristically grating” acting) to be a fatal flaw.

Personally, I thought it was the greatest thing Luhrmann had ever made, a perfect match between subject and filmmaker. It reminded me of Oliver Stone’s breathless, Shakespearean tragedy about Richard Nixon (1995’s Nixon), itself an underrated masterpiece. Yet somehow, even for me, it failed to light a fire of interest in Presley himself — and by design, I now realize after seeing EPiC, it omitted at least one major aspect of Elvis’ appeal: the man was charmingly, endearingly funny.

As seen in Luhrmann’s new documentary, on stage, in the midst of a serious song, Elvis will pull a face, or ad lib a line about his suit being too tight to get on his knees, or sing for a while with a bra (which has been flung from the audience) draped over his head. He’s constantly laughing and ribbing and keeping his musicians, and himself, entertained. If Elvis was a tragedy, EPiC is a romantic comedy — and Presley’s seduction of us, the audience, is utterly irresistible.

Unearthing old concert footage

It was in the process of making Elvis that Luhrmann discovered dozens of long-rumored concert footage tapes in a Kansas salt mine, where Warner Bros. stores some of their film archives. Working with Peter Jackson’s team at the post-production facility Park Road Post, who did the miraculous restoration of Beatles rehearsal footage for Jackson’s 2021 Disney+ series, Get Back, they burnished 50-plus hours of 55-year-old celluloid into an eye-popping sheen with enough visual fidelity to fill an IMAX screen. In doing so, they resurrected a woolly mammoth. The film — which is a creative amalgamation of takes from rehearsals and concerts that span from 1970 to 1972 — places the viewer so close to the action that we can viscerally feel the thumping of the bass and almost sense that we’ll get flecked with the sweat dripping off Presley’s face.

Sofia Coppola imagines Priscilla's teen years, living at Graceland with Elvis

This footage was originally shot for the 1970 concert film Elvis: That’s The Way It Is, and its 1972 sequel, Elvis on Tour, which explains why these concerts were shot like a Hollywood feature: wide shots on anamorphic 35mm and with giant, ultra-bright Klieg lights — which, Luhrmann explains, “are really disturbing. So [Elvis] was very apologetic to the audience, because the audience felt a bit more self conscious than they would have been at a normal show. They were actually making a movie, they weren’t just shooting a concert.”

Luhrmann chose to leave in many shots where camera operators can be seen running around with their 16mm cameras for close-ups, “like they’re in the Vietnam War trying to get the best angles,” because we live in an era where we’re used to seeing cameras everywhere and Luhrmann felt none of the original directors’ concern about breaking the illusion. Those extreme close-ups, which were achieved by operators doing math and manually pulling focus, allow us to see even the pores on Presley’s skin — now projected onto a screen the size of two buildings.

The sweat that comes out of those pores is practically a character in the film. Luhrmann marvels at how much Presley gave in every single rehearsal and every single concert performance. Beyond the fact that “he must have superhuman strength,” Luhrmann says, “He becomes the music. He doesn’t mark stuff. He just becomes the music, and then no one knows what he’s going to do. The band do not know what he’s going to do, so they have to keep their eyes on him all the time. They don’t know how many rounds he’s going to do in ‘Suspicious Minds.’ You know, he conducts them with his entire being — and that’s what makes him unique.”

Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in Aug. 1970.

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It’s not the only thing. The revivified concerts in EPiC are a potent argument that Elvis wasn’t just a superior live performer to the Beatles (who supplanted him as the kings of pop culture in the 1960s), but possibly the greatest live performer of all time. His sensual, magmatic charisma on stage, the way he conducts the large band and choir, the control he has over that godlike gospel voice, and the sorcerer’s power he has to hold an entire audience in the palm of his hands (and often to kiss many of its women on the lips) all come across with stunning, electrifying urgency.

Shaking off the rust and building a “dreamscape”

The fact that, on top of it all, he is effortlessly funny and goofy is, in Luhrmann’s mind, essential to the magic of Elvis. While researching for Elvis, he came to appreciate how insecure Presley was as a kid — growing up as the only white boy in a poor Black neighborhood, and seeing his father thrown into jail for passing a bad check. “Inside, he felt very less-than,” says Luhrmann, “but he grows up into a physical Greek god. I mean, we’ve forgotten how beautiful he was. You see it in the movie; he is a beautiful looking human being. And then he moves. And he doesn’t learn dance steps — he just manifests that movement. And then he’s got the voice of Orpheus, and he can take a song like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and make it into a gospel power ballad.

“So he’s like a spiritual being. And I think he’s imposing. So the goofiness, the humor is about disarming people, making them get past the image — like he says — and see the man. That’s my own theory.”

Elvis has often been second-classed in the annals of American music because he didn’t write his own songs, but Luhrmann insists that interpretation is its own invaluable art form. “Orpheus interpreted the music as well,” the director says.

In this way — as in their shared maximalist, cape-and-rhinestones style — Luhrmann and Elvis are a match made in Graceland. Whether he’s remixing Shakespeare as a ’90s punk music video in Romeo + Juliet or adding hip-hop beats to The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann is an artist who loves to take what was vibrantly, shockingly new in another century and make it so again.

Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in Aug. 1970.

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Luhrmann says he likes to take classic work and “shake off the rust and go, Well, when it was written, it wasn’t classical. When it was created, it was pop, it was modern, it was in the moment. That’s what I try and do.”

To that end, he conceived EPiC as “an imagined concert,” liberally building sequences from various nights, sometimes inserting rehearsal takes into a stage performance (ecstatically so in the song “Polk Salad Annie”), and adding new musical layers to some of the songs. Working with his music producer, Jamieson Shaw, he backed the King’s vocals on “Oh Happy Day” with a new recording of a Black gospel choir in Nashville. “So that’s an imaginative leap,” says Luhrmann. “It’s kind of a dreamscape.”

On some tracks, like “Burning Love,” new string arrangements give the live performances extra verve and cinematic depth. Luhrmann and his music team also radically remixed multiple Elvis songs into a new number, “A Change of Reality,” which has the King repeatedly asking “Do you miss me?” over a buzzing bass line and a syncopated beat.

I didn’t miss Elvis before I saw EPiC — but after seeing the film twice now, I truly do.