UPDATE with more information and interview with Nottage.

Lynn Nottage won her second Pultizer Prize for Drama today, winning the award for Sweat, a drama set in a Pennsylvania factory town ravaged by changing economics and the social forces that culminated with the November election of Donald Trump. The play, staged by Kate Whoriskey, opened earlier this month on Broadway.

“Sharp and threatening as a box cutter blade, Lynn Nottage’s drama Sweat opened last fall at the Public Theater shortly before the election, an unnervingly prescient reality check even before Donald Trump’s victory,” I wrote in the review for Deadline. ” ‘No play in recent memory has shed more light on the crises and tribulations of America’s great retrenched working middle class,’ I wrote then, and that remains true these five tumultuous months later.”

In 2009, Nottage won the prize for her play Ruined, about the enforced sexual slavery of women during the civil war in the Republic of Congo.

“I’m excited that I can bring the conversation which is neccesary to the main stage,” Notttage told Deadline this afternoon in a telephone interview after the announcement. “The economic devsatation affecting the culture as a whole and raising awaareness for smoe folks who were relutctant to engage in this converstation.”

Asked about the response she’s seen from audiences, Nottage said, “From my point of view, the audience reaction has been tremendous. The curtain comes down and they’re hit for a moment, which is as I wanted it to be – a dialogue startrer that then people could conjure with. Reading is a bedrock of our culture being destroyed.”

Sweat marks the second Pulitzer for a playwright committed to art as a vehicle for social awareness. “I hold onto Werner Herzog’s notion that the job of the artist is to keep your eyes open when everyone else’s are shut. sometimes what you see ist beautiful and sometimes it’s ugly, and the artist shouldn’t be afraid to hold that mirror.”

The Pulitzer Prize for criticism was awarded for the second year in a row to a critic from The New Yorker magazine. The recipient is drama critic Hilton Als. Last year, the criticism award went to television critic Emily Nussbaum. The 2016 prizes marked the first time the awardsm which were established to honor daily newspaper print journalism, were opened up to magazine journalists.

Mike Pride, administrator of the Pultizers, began the announcements this afternoon from Columbia University with an Oscars joke, ad libbing, “Just making sure I have the right envelope.”

The Pultizers are the most coveted awards in print and, mpre recently, online journalism and among the most coveted in the arts; this year the cash value of the prizes was raised to $15,000 from $10,000. The top journalism award, the Gold Medal for Public Service, was awarded to the New York Daily News and Pro Publica, an independent investigative group that works with established papers, for a series on the NYPD’s use of a decades-old law to force people from their homes and businesses over alleged illegal activity.</s>The 101st Pulitzer Prize winners were revealed on Monday, with Pulitzer Prize Administrator Mike Pride announcing the recipients at Columbia University, New York. Author Colson Whitehead won the fiction award “for a smart melding of realism and allegory” in his book The Underground Railroad. Lynn Nottage bagged the drama award for her “nuanced yet powerful”, Sweat.

The journalism awards went out to some of the biggest stories in the past year. David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post won the Pulitzer for national reporting for his focus on US President Donald Trump’s work on charities. Fahrenthold had also broken the story of the Access Hollywood recording from 2005 in which Trump can be heard making lewd remarks about women.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the McClatchy Company, and The Miami Herald, who had unearthed the Panama Papers story, were awarded for explanatory reporting. The New York Times won three Pulitzers for breaking news photography, international reporting and feature writing. Freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak won the honour for his photo essay titled “They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals”, which depicted the violent crackdown on drugs in the Philippines.

The Pulitzer Prize for music went to composer Du Yun for Angel’s Bone, “a bold operatic work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles”. Sociologist Matthew Desmond bagged the award in the general nonfiction category for his “deeply researched exposé” Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

You can find the full list of winners here.</s>The acclaimed slavery novel has been rewarded alongside Lynn Nottage’s factory drama Sweat and Matthew Desmond’s nonfiction work Evicted

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead review – luminous, furious and wildly inventive Read more

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“For a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

colson whitehead (@colsonwhitehead) Giddy-up, motherfucker!

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.



Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers.</s>Colson Whitehead won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in fiction Monday for “The Underground Railroad.” It caps a sweep of accolades that the book has received since its publication by Doubleday in August 2016, including winning the National Book Award in November and being selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

The Pulitzer committee praised “The Underground Railroad” as “a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.”

“The Underground Railroad” took Whitehead 16 years to write. He received a MacArthur fellowship in 2002.

In her review of the book, Los Angeles Times critic-at-large Rebecca Carroll wrote that it is “a fiercely salient reckoning of what it means, has meant and continues to mean to be black in America” and noted that “’the Underground Railroad’ could not be more timely and necessary.”

The two finalists in fiction were “Imagine Me Gone” by Adam Haslett and “The Sport of Kings” by C.E. Morgan.

“The Underground Railroad’s” win marks the Pulitzer Prizes’ 101st year . A complete list of winners and finalists can be found on the Pulitzer website.</s>Current Broadway play “Sweat” has scored playwright Lynn Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama, with the award this year going to a show that has proven a timely look at a group of working-class friends in a declining factory town.

Nottage, who conducted interviews and research into the declining community of Reading, Penn., as inspiration for the play, previously picked up the 2009 drama Pulitzer for “Ruined,” her drama set in the Congo. Also among the list of Pulitzer winners was New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als, winning the award for criticism, as well as Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” bagging the fiction prize.

The two finalists for the drama prize were “The Wolves,” Sarah DeLappe’s bracing story of a girl’s soccer team, and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” Taylor Mac’s ambitious, 24-hour cycle of American musical throughout the nation’s lifespan.</s>Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” his celebrated novel about an escaped slave that combined liberating imagination and brutal reality, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The announcement confirmed the book as the literary event of 2016, an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and critical favorite which last fall received the National Book Award, the first time in more than 20 years that the same work won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for fiction.

Whitehead, known for such explorations of American myth and history as “John Henry Days,” conceived his novel with what he calls a “goofy idea:” Take the so-called Underground Railroad of history, the network of escape routes to freedom, and make it an actual train. He wove his fantasy together with a too-believable story of a young girl’s flight from a plantation.

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Whitehead finished “The Underground Railroad” well before Donald Trump’s election but now finds parallels with the present. “I think the book deals with white supremacy as a foundational error in the country’s history and that foundational error is being played out now in the White House,” he told The Associated Press.

“When I was writing the book I wasn’t thinking about current events, but I think you have to look at it differently now.”

Other winners announced also touched upon race and class, in the present and in the past. Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat,” which won for drama, explores how the shutdown of a Pennsylvania factory leads to the breakdown of friendship and family, and a devastating cycle of violence, prejudice, poverty and drugs.

The play marks Nottage’s Broadway debut and her second Pulitzer Prize. She is the writer of “Intimate Apparel,” ”By The Way, Meet Vera Stark” and “Ruined,” which also won the Pulitzer.

“I was looking at how poverty and economic stagnation was beginning to shift our American narrative and how a culture was crying out,” Nottage told the AP after her win.

“I’m very honored. I’m in a bit of a daze.”

The history winner, Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” examines the events that unfolded starting September 9, 1971, when nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment.

The work reveals the crimes committed during the uprising and its aftermath, who committed them, and how they were covered up.

The general nonfiction winner was Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” set in Milwaukee and praised by the Pulitzer board as “a deeply researched expose that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.”

Desmond, who last month won a National Book Critics Circle award, said that he hoped his book would illuminate both the severity of the crisis and the role of government.

“You look at a public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home,” he told the AP.

“Both are government subsidised, but they don’t look anything alike. We seem a lot more willing to spend money on tax write-offs than on direct assistance.”

Hisham Matar’s “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between” won for biography/autobiography; the Pulitzer board said that Matar’s memoir about his native Libya “examines with controlled emotion the past and present of an embattled region.”

Tyehimba Jess’ “Oilo” was the poetry winner, cited for melding performance art with poetry “to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”

The Pulitzer board gave the music award to Du Yun’s “Angel’s Bone” and called it a “bold” work which “integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.”</s>Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," his celebrated novel about an escaped slave that combined liberating imagination and brutal reality, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Monday's announcement confirmed the book as the literary event of 2016, an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and critical favorite which last fall received the National Book Award, the first time in more than 20 years that the same work won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for fiction. Whitehead, known for such explorations of American myth and history as "John Henry Days," conceived his novel with what he calls a "goofy idea:" Take the so-called Underground Railroad of history, the network of escape routes to freedom, and make it an actual train. He wove his fantasy together with a too-believable story of a young girl's flight from a plantation.

Whitehead finished "The Underground Railroad" well before Donald Trump's election but now finds parallels with the present.

"I think the book deals with white supremacy as a foundational error in the country's history and that foundational error is being played out now in the White House," he told The Associated Press on Monday. "When I was writing the book I wasn't thinking about current events, but I think you have to look at it differently now."

Other winners announced Monday also touched upon race and class, in the present and in the past.

Lynn Nottage's "Sweat," which won for drama, explores how the shutdown of a Pennsylvania factory leads to the breakdown of friendship and family, and a devastating cycle of violence, prejudice, poverty and drugs. The play marks Nottage's Broadway debut and her second Pulitzer Prize. She is the writer of "Intimate Apparel," ''By The Way, Meet Vera Stark" and "Ruined," which also won the Pulitzer.

"I was looking at how poverty and economic stagnation was beginning to shift our American narrative and how a culture was crying out," Nottage told the AP after her win Monday. "I'm very honored. I'm in a bit of a daze."

The history winner, Heather Ann Thompson's "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy," examines the events that unfolded starting Sept. 9, 1971, when nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. The work reveals the crimes committed during the uprising and its aftermath, who committed them, and how they were covered up.

Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan, was teaching her second class of the day when her cellphone awakened with a call from her book agent about the win. Her students burst into applause.

Thompson said she was most happy that survivors of the uprising and subsequent brutal crackdown were able to have their stories told after more than four decades.

"Beyond Attica, I'm hoping that it also shines a light on inside these correctional facilities, of which we have more in this country than any other country on the planet," she said. "I hope it reminds us that the 2.5 million people that are locked up in a correctional facility are human beings."

The general nonfiction winner was Matthew Desmond's "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," set in Milwaukee and praised by the Pulitzer board as "a deeply researched expose that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty." Desmond, who last month won a National Book Critics Circle award, said Monday that he hoped his book would illuminate both the severity of the crisis and the role of government.

"You look at a public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home," he told the AP. "Both are government subsidized, but they don't look anything alike. We seem a lot more willing to spend money on tax write-offs than on direct assistance."

Hisham Matar's "The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between" won for biography/autobiography; the Pulitzer board said Monday that Matar's memoir about his native Libya "examines with controlled emotion the past and present of an embattled region." Tyehimba Jess' "Olio" was the poetry winner, cited for melding performance art with poetry "to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity."

The Pulitzer board gave the music award to Du Yun's "Angel's Bone" and called it a "bold" work which "integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world."

Yun had just returned from a day of panels at The Culture Summit in Abu Dhabi, and her librettist Royce Vavrek texted her the good news, which arrived close to midnight for Yun. She said that it was great to hear after a day of learning "how to use art and make art ... to advance cultural change" at The Culture Summit.

"I met a lot of people who work intensively with refugees and human trafficking, which was the top of my work," Yun said. "We just had this intense conversation about how to really use art to affect policies."

Associated Press writers Lynn Elber in Los Angeles and Mark Kennedy and Mesfin Fekadu in New York contributed to this report.

Predictions for this year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction</s>The Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been awarded to Sweat, by Lynn Nottage. The play was recognized as a nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream. Sweat is currently playing on Broadway at Studio 54, after a sold-out run at the Public Theater and previous productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and D.C.’s Arena Stage, who together co-commissioned the piece originally. In the video below, Nottage speaks with PBS NewsHour about this important American drama, which she began working on in 2011 but today has taken on an incredible timeliness.</s>Lynn Nottage’s drama Sweat, currently on Broadway at Studio 54, is the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This marks Nottage’s second Pulitzer win; she won in 2009 for her play Ruined. Nottage will receive a prize of $10,000.

 

 "I am elated and surprised," Nottage told Broadway.com after learning of her win. "I ran through a bevy of emotions when I found out. I wish I had a better vocabulary, so I could describe how good this is."

 

 Sweat is based on Nottage's research and interviews with residents of one of the poorest cities in the country, Reading, PA. The play, set in 2000 and 2008, tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets and laughs while working together on the factory floor. When layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in a fight to stay afloat.

 

 "The people of Reading, Pennsylvania welcomed me with open arms, and they continue to welcome me and to have belief in the resurrection of their city. I hesitate to use the word resilience because I feel like I am talking in clichés, but that’s what they have," Nottage said. "I think [this Pulitzer] will change the journey of this play. I am gratified because I want it to have a wider audience, especially since this is tough subject matter without box office stars."

 

 Sweat made its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2015; it was co-commissioned with Arena Stage through OSF’s American Revolutions program. Sweat ran at Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage from January-February 2016. That run was followed up by a New York premiere at the Public Theater from October-December 2016. Kate Whoriskey has remained onboard as director for each mounting. The Broadway run of Sweat, which opened at Studio 54 on March 26, stars Johanna Day, Carlo Alban, James Colby, Khris Davis, John Earl Jelks, Will Pullen, Alison Wright, Lance Coadie Williams and Michelle Wilson.

 

 Sweat marks Nottage's Broadway debut. Her other plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Intimate Apparel, Mud, River, Stone, Antigone Project and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.

 

 The finalists for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama were A 24-Decade History of Popular Music by Taylor Mac and The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe.

 

 In other theater-related Pulitzer news: the prize for criticism went to drama critic Hilton Als of The New Yorker.</s>It was just announced by Pulitzer Prize administrator Mike Pride that Lynn Nottage's SWEAT has officially won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This marks Nottage's second Pulitzer Prize. With this award Nottage becomes the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice.

This year's finalists included: A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, by Taylor Mac and The Wolves, by Sarah DeLappe.

"It definitely feels different [than it did the first time]," Nottage told BroadwayWorld. "I think I'm a little bit older, so I'm little bit more grounded as a playwright and as a person. I can live in this moment in a way that is much more mindful. There has been such an army of support from Kate [Whoriskey] and Oregon Shakespeare, who commissioned it, and the Public Theatre, Arena Stage, and Stuart Thompson and Louise Gund, who produced it for Broadway. There are so many wonderful people who have made this moment possible in a way that allows me to enjoy it."

She continued: "The love that has surrounded this project has made it very different from some of my other projects. I think it's because it so specifically speaks to America in this moment."

SWEAT is currently playing on Broadway at Studio 54. With warm humor and tremendous heart, Lynn Nottage's Sweat tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets and laughs while working together on the line of a factory floor. But when layoffs and picket lines begin to chip away at their trust, the friends find themselves pitted against each other in the hard fight to stay afloat. Kate Whoriskey directs this stunning new play about the collision of race, class, family and friendship, and the tragic, unintended costs of community without opportunity.

2015- Between Riverside and Crazy, by Stephen Adly Guirgis

2012- Water by the Spoonful, by Quiara Alegría Hudes

2010- Next to Normal, by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey

2004- I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright

2003- Anna in the Tropics, by Nilo Cruz

1998- How I Learned to Drive, by Paula Vogel

1995- The Young Man From Atlanta, by Horton Foote

1985- Sunday in the Park With George, by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

1981- Crimes of the Heart, by Beth Henley

1971- The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds, by Paul Zindel

1970- No Place To Be Somebody, by Charles Gordone

1965- The Subject Was Roses, by Frank D. Gilroy

1962- How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, by Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows

1961- All The Way Home, by Tad Mosel

1956- Diary of Anne Frank, by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich

1954- The Teahouse of the August Moon, by John Patrick

1946- State of the Union, by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay

1943- The Skin of Our Teeth, by Thornton Wilder

1941- There Shall Be No Night, by Robert E. Sherwood

1940- The Time of Your Life, by William Saroyan

1937- You Can't Take It With You, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman

1935- The Old Maid, by Zoe Akins

1933- Both Your Houses, by Maxwell Anderson

1932- Of Thee I Sing, by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin

1925- They Knew What They Wanted, by Sidney Howard

1920- Beyond the Horizon, by Eugene O'Neill
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Sweat by Lynn Nottage win the Pultizer Prizes for Fiction and Drama respectively.