These 7 Books Just Won Pulitzer Prizes

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The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced in New York City today. This is the 108th edition of the honor, which recognizes excellence in journalism and the arts, and among the winners today were two special citations: One for the late writer and critic Greg Tate, and another for journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza.

John F. Kennedy famously said back in 1953 "I would rather win a Pulitzer Prize than be president." He eventually did both: He won a Pulitzer in Biography for Profiles in Courage in 1957, then was elected president just three years later. As Craig Fehrman, author of Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote, wrote in Politico, "Kennedy's friends and family always said the Pulitzer made him happier than any other honor, including his World War II Purple Heart."

Here, the books that won 2024 Pulitzer Prizes:

Night Watch: A novel

2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

Jayne Anne Phillip's Night Watch tells the story of a mother and her daughter who take refuge in a mental hospital in post-Civil War West Virginia. Per the Pulitzer Committee, the work is "a beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal."

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

2024 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction

Nathan Thrall's A Day in the Life of Abed Salama details a deadly 2012 bus crash outside Jerusalem, shining a light on the realities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank. It is based on a 2021 New York Review of Books piece of the same name. The Pulitzer committee notes, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is "a finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations."

Tripas: Poems

2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Brandon Som's Tripas poems take inspiration from his "multicultural, multigenerational childhood home," per the publisher, "in which he celebrates his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the assembly line at Motorola, and his Chinese American father and grandparents, who ran the family corner store." The Pulitzer committee writes that Tripas "deeply engages with the complexities of the poet’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage, highlighting the dignity of his family’s working lives, creating community rather than conflict."

King: A Life

2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

Jonathan Eig's biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of the winners of this year's Pulitzer in Biography, with the0 committee calling King "a revelatory portrait" that "draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each stage of the civil rights leader’s life."

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography

The other winner in Biography was Ilyon Woo's story of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848. As the Pulizer committee notes, the couple "exploit[ed] assumptions about race, class and disability to hide in public on their journey to the North, where they became famous abolitionists while evading bounty hunters."

Liliana's Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice

2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir

Cristina Rivera Garza's memoir, Liliana's Invincible Summer, details her search for Liliana Rivera Garza, her sister who disappeared in Mexico. It is "a genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister, murdered by a former boyfriend, that mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss," the Pulitzer committee writes.

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

2024 Pulitzer Prize in History

In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones focuses on Black Bostonians during the Civil War Era. The Pulitzer committee writes that it is a "a breathtakingly 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."

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