At 3 pm today, (two weeks later than in non-pandemic years), the Pulitzer Board announced the recipients of the 104th Pulitzer Prizes (not to be confused with the Nobel) honoring excellence in journalism.

The announcement livestream was originally scheduled for April 20, 2020, but in early April, the Board put out a press release stating that they would be delayed due to obligations by the Pulitzer Board to dedicate time to covering the coronavirus pandemic. The award ceremony, typically held on Columbia’s campus in May, has been postponed to the fall.

While we won’t see any winners quite as famous as Kendrick Lamar when we (hopefully) return to campus this fall, a number of notable names/projects were honored. The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones won for the 1619 Project, which works to “place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story” 400 years after the first enslaved people were brought to America and faced conservative backlash upon its publication. (Hannah-Jones came to Columbia to talk about the 1619 Project and its response back in November.) Some other noteworthy winners include Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boy’s for Best Novel; the Photography Staff of Reuters, for their Breaking News photography of the Hong Kong protests; and the Washington Post in Explanatory Reporting for their coverage of the effect of extreme temperatures on our planet. This year also marked the first year a prize was given in the category of Audio Reporting, proving that the dominance of podcasts doesn’t seem like it’ll be fading any time soon.

Below are the winners from each category. You can find the full list of finalists and the body of work the Pulitzer Board considered on the Pulitzer website.

Journalism:

Public Service: Anchorage Daily News with contributions from 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: Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, Mike Baker and Lewis Kamb of The Seattle Times; and T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi of ProPublica
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 Associated Press
Audio Reporting: Staff of This American Life with Molly O’Toole of the Los Angeles Times and Emily Green, freelancer, Vice News

Letters, Drama, and Music:

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)
Poetry: The Tradition, by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)
General Nonfiction: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books); and The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care, by Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
Music: The Central Park Five, by Anthony Davis

Special Awards and Citations:

  • Ida B. Wells
    • For her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.

Screenshot via Pulitzer livestream