Pulitzer Prizes: 2024 Winners List

PUBLIC SERVICE

ProPublica

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; The Washington Post

BREAKING NEWS

Staff of Lookout Santa Cruz

Lookout Santa Cruz won for “its detailed and nimble community-focused coverage, over a holiday weekend, of catastrophic flooding and mudslides that displaced thousands of residents and destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses.”

Finalists Staff of Honolulu Civil Beat; Staff of The Los Angeles Times

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING

Hannah Dreier of The New York Times

Ms. Dreier was honored for “a deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States — and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.”

Finalists Staff of Bloomberg; Casey Ross and Robert Herman of Stat

EXPLANATORY REPORTING

Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker

Ms. Stillman’s work was a “searing indictment of our legal system’s reliance on the felony murder charge and its disparate consequences, often devastating for communities of color,” the committee said.

Finalists Staff of Bloomberg; Staffs of The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and Frontline

LOCAL REPORTING

Sarah Conway of 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 neglect contributed to the crisis.”

Finalists Jerry Mitchell, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield of Mississippi Today and The New York Times; Staff of The Villages Daily Sun

NATIONAL REPORTING

Staff of Reuters and Staff of The Washington Post

This year’s national reporting category had two winners. The staff of Reuters won for “an eye-opening series of accountability stories” focused on the automobile and aerospace businesses helmed by the billionaire Elon Musk. The staff of The Washington Post won for “its sobering examination of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.”

Finalists Bianca Vázquez Toness and Sharon Lurye of The Associated Press; Dave Philipps of The New York Times

INTERNATIONAL REPORTING

Staff of The New York Times

The New York Times won for its “wide-ranging and revelatory coverage of Hamas’ lethal attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s intelligence failures and the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza,” the committee said.

Finalists Julie Turkewitz and Federico Rios of The New York Times; Staff of The Washington Post

Feature writing

Katie Engelhart, contributing writer, The New York Times

Ms. Engelhart was honored “for her fair-minded portrait of a family’s legal and emotional struggles during a matriarch’s progressive dementia.” Her article “sensitively probes the mystery of a person’s essential self,” the committee said.

Finalists Keri Blakinger of The Marshall Project, co-published with The New York Times Magazine; Jennifer Senior of The Atlantic

COMMENTARY

Vladimir Kara-Murza, contributor, The Washington Post

The committee highlighted 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 Reflector; Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker

CRITICISM

Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times

Mr. Chang’s film criticism “reflects on the contemporary moviegoing experience,” the commitee said, praising it as “richly evocative and genre-spanning.”

Finalists Zadie Smith, contributor, The New York Review of Books; Vinson Cunningham of The New Yorker

EDITORIAL WRITING

David E. Hoffman of The Washington Post

Mr. Hoffman was honored for his “compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age and how they can be fought.”

Finalists Isadora Rangel of The Miami Herald; Brandon McGinley and Rebecca Spiess of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Illustrated Reporting and Commentary

Medar de la Cruz, contributor, The New Yorker

Mr. de la Cruz was honored for “his visually driven story set inside 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, The New Yorker; Claire Healy, Nicole Dungca and Ren Galeno, contributor, of The Washington Post

BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography Staff of Reuters

The photography staff won for “raw and urgent photographs documenting the Oct. 7 deadly attack in 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

Photography Staff of The Associated Press

The journalists were honored for “poignant photographs chronicling unprecedented masses of migrants and their arduous journey north from Colombia to the border of the United States.”

Finalists Nanna Heitmann, contributor, The New York Times; Hannah Reyes Morales, contributor, The New York Times

AUDIO REPORTING

Staffs of the Invisible Institute and USG Audio

The two newsrooms won for a “powerful series that revisits a Chicago hate crime from the 1990s, a fluid amalgam of memoir, community history and journalism.”

Finalists Dan Slepian and Preeti Varathan, contributor, of NBC News; Lauren Chooljian, Alison Macadam, Jason Moon, Daniel Barrick and Katie Colaneri of New Hampshire Public Radio

FICTION

“Night Watch,” by Jayne Anne Phillips

Ms. Phillips won for her “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.”

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 and 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 “Here There Are Blueberries,” by Moises 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 awarded 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 Immigrant Radicals and the U.S. Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century,” by Michael Willrich

Two awards were given in this category. Mr. Eig was honored for “a revelatory portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. that draws on new sources to enrich our understanding of each 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 light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant.”

Finalists “Larry McMurtry: A Life,” by Tracy Daugherty

MEMOIR 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 genre-bending account of the author’s 20-year-old sister,” who was murdered by a former boyfriend. It “mixes memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography stitched together with a determination born of loss,” the committee said.

Finalists “The Country 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 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,” the committee wrote.

Finalists “To 2040,” by Jorie Graham; “Information Desk: An Epic,” by Robyn Schiff

GENERAL NONFICTION

“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” by Nathan Thrall

The committee honored Mr. Thrall for his “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.”

Finalists “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives,” by Siddharth Kara; “Fire Weather: A True Story From 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 in a slow tempo, a beautiful homage that’s 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 citations

Greg Tate

The writer and critic Greg Tate was honored posthumously for his influence in shaping public thought and language around hip-hop and street art. “His aesthetic, innovations and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering hip-hop criticism, 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 casualties. As the Pulitzer Prizes honor categories of journalism, arts and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.”