PUBLIC SERVICE
ProPública
The Pulitzer Committee honored ProPublica for the work of Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Alex Mierjeski and Kirsten Berg, citing their “groundbreaking and ambitious reporting that pierced the thick wall of secrecy surrounding the Supreme Court.”
Finalists KFF Health News and Cox Media Group; Washington Post
BREAKING NEWS
Mirador Santa Cruz Staff
Lookout Santa Cruz won for “its detailed, agile, community-focused holiday weekend coverage of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses.”
Finalists Honolulu Civil Beat Staff; Los Angeles Times Staff
INVESTIGATION REPORTS
Hannah Dreier of the New York Times
Ms. Dreier was honored for “a series of deeply documented stories that reveal the shocking extent of migrant child labor across the United States and the corporate and government failures that perpetuate it.”
Finalists Bloomberg Staff; Stat’s Casey Ross and Robert Herman
EXPLANATORY REPORT
Sarah Stillman of the New Yorker
Ms. Stillman’s work was a “scathing indictment of our legal system’s reliance on the charge of felony murder and its disparate, often devastating consequences for communities of color,” the committee said.
Finalists Bloomberg Staff; The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Frontline staff
LOCAL REPORTS
Sarah Conway of the City Bureau and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute
Ms. Conway and Ms. Reynolds-Tyler were honored for “their investigative series on missing Black girls and women in Chicago that revealed how systemic racism and police department negligence contributed to the crisis.”
Finalists Jerry Mitchell, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield of Mississippi Today and The New York Times; The Villages Daily Sun Staff
NATIONAL REPORTS
Reuters staff and The Washington Post staff
This year’s national reporting category had two winners. Reuters staff won for “an eye-opening series of accountability stories” focused on the auto and aerospace businesses run by billionaire Elon Musk. The Washington Post staff won for “their sobering examination of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.”
Finalists Bianca Vázquez Toness and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press; Dave Philipps of the New York Times
INTERNATIONAL REPORTS
New York Times Staff
The New York Times won for its “extensive and revealing coverage of the deadly Hamas attack in southern Israel on October 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s radical and deadly response in Gaza,” the committee said.
Finalists Julie Turkewitz and Federico Ríos of the New York Times; Washington Post Staff
Article writing
Katie Engelhart, New York Times contributing writer
Ms. Engelhart was honored “for her unbiased portrayal of a family’s legal and emotional struggles during the progressive dementia of a matriarch.” Her article “sensitively investigates the mystery of a person’s essential self,” the committee said.
Finalists Keri Blakeinger of the Marshall Project, co-published with The New York Times Magazine; Jennifer Senior from The Atlantic
COMMENT
Vladimir Kara-Murza, Washington Post contributor
The committee noted Mr. Kara-Murza’s “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.”
Finalists Brian Lyman of The Alabama Searchlight; Jay Caspian Kang of the New Yorker
CRITICISM
Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times
Mr. Chang’s film criticism “reflects the contemporary film experience,” the committee said, praising it as “richly evocative and spanning multiple genres.”
Finalists Zadie Smith, contributor to The New York Review of Books; The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham
EDITORIAL WRITING
David E. Hoffman of the Washington Post
Hoffman was honored for his “compelling, well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to suppress dissent in the digital age and how to combat them.”
Finalists Isadora Rangel of the Miami Herald; Brandon McGinley and Rebecca Spiess of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Illustrated reports and comments
Medar de la Cruz, contributor, The New Yorker
Mr. de la Cruz was honored for “his visual story set inside the Rikers Island jail using bold black and white images that humanize the prisoners and staff through their hunger for books.”
Finalists Clay Bennett of The Chattanooga Times Free Press; Angie Wang, contributor to The New Yorker; Claire Healy, Nicole Dungca and Ren Galeno, Washington Post contributor
LAST MINUTE PHOTOGRAPHY
Reuters photography staff
The photography team won for “raw, urgent photographs documenting the deadly October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the first weeks of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza.”
Finalists Adem Altan of Agence France-Presse; Nicole S. Hester of The Tennessean
FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY
The Associated Press Photo Staff
The journalists were honored for “moving photographs chronicling unprecedented masses of migrants and their arduous journey north from Colombia to the United States border.”
Finalists Nanna Heitmann, contributor to The New York Times; Hannah Reyes Morales, contributor, The New York Times
AUDIO REPORTS
Invisible Institute and USG Audio Staff
The two newsrooms won for a “powerful series that revisits a hate crime in Chicago in the 1990s, a fluid amalgam of memoir, community history and journalism.”
Finalists Dan Slepian and Preeti Varathan, NBC News contributor; Lauren Chooljian, Alison Macadam, Jason Moon, Daniel Barrick and Katie Colaneri of New Hampshire Public Radio
FICTION
“The Night Watch” by Jayne Anne Phillips
Ms. Phillips won for her “beautifully acted novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Asylum after the Civil War, where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by “a Confederate soldier, fights to heal.”
Finalists “Wednesday’s Child”, by Yiyun Li; “Same bed, different dreams”, by Ed Park
DRAMA
“Primary Trust” by Eboni Booth
The committee described Ms. Booth’s play “Primary Trust” as a “simple, 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.”
Finalists “There Are Blueberries Here,” by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich; “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury
HISTORY
“No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era,” by Jacqueline Jones
Ms. Jones was honored for her “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.”
Finalists “Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion,” by Elliott West; “American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Radical Immigrants and the United States Government at the Dawn of the 20th Century,” by Michael Willrich
Two awards were awarded in this category. Mr. Eig was honored for “a revealing portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of every stage of the civil rights leader’s life.”
Ms. Woo was honored for her narrative of the Crafts, “an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with the light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white knight and William as her servant.”
Finalists “Larry McMurtry: A Life” by Tracy Daugherty
MEMORY OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY
“Liliana’s invincible summer: a sister’s search for justice,” by Cristina Rivera Garza
The committee called Ms. Rivera Garza’s work “a gender-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister,” who was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. “It blends memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography united with a determination born of loss,” the committee said.
Finalists “The Land of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight,” by Andrew Leland; “The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions” by Jonathan Rosen
Mr. Som’s work is “a collection that deeply addresses the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working life and creating community rather than conflict,” the committee wrote.
Finalists “Until 2040”, by Jorie Graham; “Information Desk: An Epic” by Robyn Schiff
GENERAL NON-FICTION
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” by Nathan Thrall
The committee honored Mr. Thrall for his “excellent and intimate account of life under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through the portrait of a Palestinian father whose 5-year-old son is killed in a violent school bus accident when Israelis and Palestinians “Rescue teams are delayed by safety regulations.”
Finalists “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives,” by Siddharth Kara; “Fire Climate: A True Story of a Hotter World,” by John Vaillant
MUSIC
“Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith)” by Tyshawn Sorey
Mr. Sorey’s saxophone concerto has “a wide range of textures presented at a slow tempo, a beautiful tribute that is quietly intense, treasuring intimacy rather than spectacle,” the committee said.
Finalists “Paper Pianos,” by Mary Kouyoumdjian; “Double Concerto for Esperanza Spalding, Claire Chase and large orchestra”, by Felipe Lara
Special appointments
Greg Tate
Writer and critic Greg Tate was honored posthumously for his influence in shaping public thought and language around hip-hop and street art. “His aesthetics, innovations, and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering criticism of hip-hop, continue to influence subsequent generations, especially writers and critics of color,” the committee wrote.
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,” the committee wrote. “This war has also claimed the lives of poets and writers among the victims. “As the Pulitzer Prizes honor the categories of journalism, arts and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.”