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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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Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
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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Ivan Valencia/AP
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.”
The Kennedy Center, the facade of which remains covered with a tarp, is seen in Washington, DC, on June 28, 2026. A US federal judge asked on June 24 for an explanation for why a tarpaulin continues to cover the facade of the Kennedy Center where President Donald Trump’s name was recently removed. District Judge Christopher Cooper gave the board of trustees of the performing arts venue until the end of July to explain “the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center.”
ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
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ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
More than two weeks ago, President Trump’s name was removed from the Kennedy Center facade though it is still covered by a tarp and the legal battle continues.
On Monday, a U.S. Department of Justice filing on behalf of the Kennedy Center included some surprises. The document was submitted in response to issues raised by lawyers for ex-officio board member Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio who is suing to remove President Trump’s name from the center and stop its closure for renovations.
Among the revelations, the Kennedy Center admitted that, during a board meeting on December 18, 2025, Beatty had been “muted and prevented from speaking.” It was at that meeting that the board voted to add President Trump’s name to the center. The filing later acknowledges the congresswoman was “prevented from voicing her opposition.”
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a living memorial to its namesake. The guidelines for how the theatre complex spends federal dollars are very specific. Among other rules, it states that “no additional memorials or plaques shall be designated or installed.” Beatty argues adding Trump’s name runs afoul of those rules and that any change requires approval from Congress.
According to one of Beatty’s filings, “There was no advance notice in the agenda that the Board would be considering a name change,” a statement the Kennedy Center now does not deny. The center admits that, prior to voting, there was “no discussion about potential risks or downsides of the vote to adopt a secondary name for the Center.” Nor was there a board discussion “about any potential conflict of interest that might result from the vote.”
The center’s lawyers previously contended that if Trump’s name were to be removed, it would “lose money from donors who support” him and “impede the Center’s fundraising efforts.”
Closing for renovations
Earlier this year, Trump announced on social media that the Kennedy Center would close for two years for renovations. He wrote that he made the decision after “a one year review” with “Contractors, Musical Experts, Art Institutions, and other Advisors and Consultants.”
But, according to the center’s lawyers, Trump’s announcement “was made without presenting any plans, analyses, timelines, or funding information to his cotrustees and without any Board vote.”
The Kennedy Center has long denied reporting by The Washington Post that ticket sales plummeted after President Trump became the Center’s board chair. In Monday’s legal filing, the Center admits that, by October 2025, “nearly half of the Center’s tickets were going unsold.”
Paul Tremblay has made a career of pushing the horror genre – and the novel format – in strange and exciting new directions.
In his latest, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep, the author offers an amalgamation of genre elements that can be best described as psychological-dystopian-science-fiction horror. It’s a mouthful, but the narrative does all of that and more in a way that defies categorization.
Julia Flang is a former semiprofessional gamer working two mediocre jobs she dislikes and living in a modest ranch house in a San Fernando Valley suburb with her retired uncle, whom she calls Uncle Fun. Julia likes movies and gaming but there’s little else going on in her life, so when her estranged mother, the CFO of a large tech company, contacts her with a possible job offer – a “once-in-a-lifetime thing” that pays handsomely just for doing the interview – she hesitantly agrees.
The job is relatively simple and perfect for someone with gaming skills: using a controller built into a phone to get a man, who is stuck in a vegetative state, from California to the East Coast. It will require her to learn how to control his body – walking, moving, sitting, standing, using his arms – so she can maneuver him out of the facility where he is located and into cars and planes and through crowded airports. A fan of movies, Julia decides to call the man Bernie – after the movie Weekend at Bernie’s. When the ethics of the job start to bother her, Julia realizes it’s too late and she must go through with it. However, she’s soon contacted by people interested in sabotaging the whole thing, people who, like her, don’t align with the shady interests of conglomerates and those set to make “gobs of money” from this new, somewhat inhuman technology.
As with every Tremblay novel, any synopsis barely scratches the surface. The novel’s chapters alternate between Julia and you (yes, you). Julia’s chapters are “normal” in the sense that they obey a chronological order and have action, basic descriptions of movement and places, and dialogue. The chapters in second person are like fever dreams from a shadow world; the desperate experiences of a man trapped inside his own body with no control of it, no clue what’s happening to him, and only a few fragmented memories of his life. Also, Tremblay uses a similarly fragmented style of storytelling (including words and sentences trapped in boxes and/or “moving” on the page) to keep things interesting but also confusing and creepy.
This novel operates on several different levels and – planes of existence? Bernie has a head full of AI that controls his body, but his consciousness is still there and struggling to regain control, struggling to remember things. There are monsters, leeches, mysterious rabbits, and eerie shadows in his world, but the true horror comes from the lack of control, from being moved around against his will and having no clue what comes next. Bernie is the embodiment of losing control to AI, and when taken together with the commentary of creativity and AI and the meta interludes in which the author takes a wrecking ball to the fourth wall and addresses readers, this is the best anti-Generative AI story horror has produced so far.
Despite the horror of it, this is a very funny novel. Julia is sarcastic and struggles to keep her comebacks in line, but the conversations she has and messages she writes are always entertaining. However, the humor is far from the crown jewel here. That title belongs to a plethora of big ideas Tremblay juggles. The nature of life, death, and consciousness, the evils of conglomerates, inhuman practices in the name of capitalism, and AI, and even what it means to be human are all explored here: “Is Bernie alive? Is he feeling pain? Is he experiencing everything as a prisoner looking through the bars of his body? Has his consciousness been winnowed to a metaphysical keyhole? Where does consciousness begin or end?” There are no definite answers here, but the way Tremblay infuses humanity, love, the importance of relationships, and humor throughout the narrative provides the kind of answers that can’t and don’t need to be spelled out.
A genre-bender full of big ideas that constantly switches between a world full of real or uncomfortably plausible nightmares and a bizarre hellscape in which loss of self, memory, and autonomy are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a horrific and terrifyingly disorienting novel that invites readers to consider a future that already started. Tremblay has always been an innovator, but this beautifully written collection of real and imagined grotesqueries cements him not only as one of the most original and exciting voices in horror but also as one of the smartest, most engaging authors in contemporary fiction.
Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias.
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