The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday and four Penguin Random House titles received the distinguished medal honoring excellence in Arts and Letters.
Fiction
THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, by Colson Whitehead, “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.”
History
BLOOD IN THE WATER: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, by Heather Ann Thompson, “a narrative history that sets high standards for scholarly judgment and tenacity of inquiry in seeking the truth about the 1971 Attica prison riots.”
Biography or Autobiography
THE RETURN: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, by Hisham Matar “a first-person elegy for home and father that examines with controlled emotion the past and present of an embattled region.”
General Nonfiction
EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond “a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.”
Penguin Random House was also well-represented among Pulitzer finalists: BROTHERS AT ARMS: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It by Larrie D. Ferreiro in history; WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR by the late Paul Kalanithi in biography or autobiography; and IN A DIFFERENT KEY: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker in general nonfiction.
The Pulitzer Prizes were established at Columbia University by the will of Joseph Pulitzer in 1904. Winners in Letters, Drama and Music receive fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).
For a full list of winners and finalists, please visit: http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2017
