The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winners

The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday afternoon, celebrating two dozen winners across journalism and the arts.

Author Daniel Kraus won in the fiction category for his book Angel Down, a story of World War I soldiers who find a fallen angel amongst the dead in No Man's Land – a tale Kraus relates entirely within one sentence. Among other winners in the books categories were historian Jill Lepore for We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution and Brian Goldstone for There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.

The Pulitzer board gave out two prizes in the local reporting category, a nod to the dynamism of both local journalism and relatively new newsrooms. One award was given to reporters from The Connecticut Mirror, a local news website, and reporters from ProPublica, who were recognized for their series on unscrupulous car-towing companies. The other was given to the staff of The Chicago Tribune for their chronicles of ICE sweeps of their city.

The audio journalism winner was the staff of the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which investigated how the Los Angeles Clippers basketball organization seemingly ducked the NBA salary cap rule by paying its star forward, Kawhi Leonard, extra money via an endorsement deal. (The NBA recently said it is still investigating. The team and its owner, Steve Ballmer, have denied the allegations, while Leonard has said of the reporting that he didn't "think it was accurate" and noted that the company he was endorsing has since folded.)

The board also gave a special citation to Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown for her 2017 and 2018 work investigating Jeffrey Epstein and his systematic abuse of young women and the network that protected him – crimes whose repercussions are still very much part of today's discourse.

As in recent years, the 2026 awards arrive under some amount of political pressure: President Trump has an active lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize board, a suit he filed in 2022 over its decision to award reporting by The New York Times and The Washington Post about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and Russia. That lawsuit is continuing.

In her remarks introducing the awards, Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller enumerated widespread and multifaceted pressures – both political and economic – on both journalism and creative work, and then added: "The fields are robust, thanks to so many dogged and talented people."

Feature Writing

"Awarded to Aaron Parsley of Texas Monthly for his extraordinary personal account of survival and loss written days after the historic Central Texas floods that tore the writer's house out from under him and his family, taking the life of his nephew."

Criticism

"Awarded to Mark Lamster of The Dallas Morning News for his rigorous and passionate architecture criticism, using wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents."

Opinion Writing

"Awarded to M. Gessen of The New York Times for an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile."

Letters and Drama Prizes

Drama

"Awarded to Liberation, by Bess Wohl, a striking blend of comedy and sincerity that explores the legacy of the consciousness-raising feminist groups of the 1970s, using the story of the playwright's mother to demonstrate how the movement grew out of conversation, and that anyone experiencing the play has joined the discussion."

History

"Awarded to We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore (Liveright), a lively and engaging narrative that investigates why the Constitution is so difficult to amend, including a review of noteworthy failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups."

Biography

"Awarded to Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution, by Amanda Vaill (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a lively and detailed biography of two daughters of wealthy and influential Dutch landowners who colored our nation's history, using present tense to tell their story and past tense to chronicle the dramatic sweep of the American Revolution."

Memoir or Autobiography

"Awarded to Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a writer's deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide a little more than six years after her older son died in the same manner, an austere and defiant memoir of acceptance that focuses on facts, language and the persistence of life."

Poetry

"Awarded to Ars Poeticas, by Juliana Spahr (Wesleyan University Press), a collection in which the poet takes stock of her personal disillusionment, which she uses to interrogate her relationship to her art form, community and politics

General Nonfiction

"Awarded to There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, by Brian Goldstone (Crown), a feat of reportage, analysis and storytelling focusing on the issues that have created a national crisis of family homelessness among the so-called working poor."

Music

"Awarded to Picaflor: A Future Myth, by Gabriela Lena Frank (G. Schirmer, Inc.), premiered on March 13, 2025 at Marian Anderson Hall, Philadelphia, a modern symphonic work informed by the composer's personal experiences with California wildfires and Andean legend, ten powerful movements that follow a hummingbird through its attempts to escape cataclysms, a contemplation of the fragile future."

Fiction

"Awarded to Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus (Atria Books), a breathless novel of World War I, a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence."