The 2024 Pulitzer Prize ceremony was held on May 6th. The Pulitzer Prizes have marked milestone writing in journalism and the arts for over a century. Held by Columbia University in New York, the 23 awards include Breaking News, Fiction, Drama, Criticism, and Music. The awards were established in 1917 from the wishes of esteemed journalist Joseph Pulitzer. The prizes were announced this year via a YouTube Livestream. The prize for Fiction is considered among the most prestigious. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has seen previous winners such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, A Visit From The Goon Squad, The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Goldfinch.
While the popularity of the featured books can vary, this year, the finalists and winners were more obscure, with none having over 2,000 ratings on the online book review site Goodreads. This year, Jayne Anne Phillips, the author of Night Watch, won despite her book being less popular than others. John Corcoran, writing for Literary Hub, said, “Her style emerges from an expert control of the line—a tight and often lyric arrangement of words that seems to reconfigure the possibility of a sentence. Fleshy is the word that comes to mind when I think of Phillips’ writing—bodies and action and sensory intertwined.” As they have for over a century, this year’s Pulitzer Prizes have again shone a spotlight on authors’ true excellence. These awards, a testament to writers’ creativity and ingenuity, continue to push the boundaries of literature and journalism, inspiring future generations of wordsmiths.
