Pulitzer Prizes Awarded to Diverse Works Including Feminism Play and WWI Novel
This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners feature a range of works spanning history, drama, memoir, and music. Among the honorees are Daniel Kraus for his novel Angel Down, a narrative set during the First World War, and Bess Wohl for her play Liberation, which explores feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s.
Officials awarded the fiction prize to Daniel Kraus, an author with an extensive background in fantasy, horror, and young adult literature. His novel Angel Down is notable for its unique structure, unfolding in one continuous sentence. Meanwhile, the drama award went to Bess Wohl’s Liberation, a reflective work on second-wave feminism.
Historical and Biographical Works Recognized
The winners announced on Monday also included two books connected to the founding of the United States. Jill Lepore received the history prize for her book on the constitution, while Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution earned the biography award.
Memoir and Nonfiction Honored
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, a candid memoir recounting the suicides of her two sons, was awarded the memoir-autobiography prize. Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America won the general nonfiction category, addressing issues of housing insecurity.
Poetry and Music Awards
The poetry prize was presented to Juliana Spahr for Ars Poeticas. The music award went to Gabriela Lena Frank for Picaflor: A Future Myth, a symphonic composition inspired by Andean legend and the California wildfires.
About the Winners
Daniel Kraus, aged 50, has had a prolific and varied career, including collaborations with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Pulitzer officials described Angel Down as:
“a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence”.
Bess Wohl’s Liberation is a memory play that gathers second-wave feminists from diverse backgrounds as they confront issues such as misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse, and gender roles. The play shifts between past and present timelines, featuring a scene in act two where six actors disrobe. This award was announced a day before the Tony Award nominations, where Liberation is anticipated to be nominated for best new play.
Critical Reception
’s Adrian Horton reviewed Liberation, awarding it four stars. Horton wrote:
“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.”
