Balakian, Nguyen Win Pulitzer Prizes [1]
Today in New York City, the Pulitzer Prize board announced the winners and finalists of the 2016 Pulitzer Prizes [4]. Of the twenty-one categories, the prizes in letters are awarded annually for works of literature published in the previous year by American authors.
The winner in poetry is Peter Balakian [5] for his collection Ozone Journal (University of Chicago), a collection of poems “that bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.” The finalists were Diane Seuss for Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf) and Elizabeth Willis for Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books).
Viet Thanh Nguyen [6] won in fiction for his debut novel, The Sympathizer (Grove), “A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a “‘man of two minds’—and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.” The finalists were Kelly Link for Get in Trouble: Stories (Random House) and Margaret Verble for Maud’s Line (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Prize administrator Mike Pride announced the winners and finalists at Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Each winner receives $10,000. A complete list [7] of winners and finalists in each of the twenty-one categories, including journalism, literature, and drama, is available on the Pulitzer Prize website.
The 2015 winners [8] included poet Gregory Pardlo and fiction writer Anthony Doerr.
Hungarian-American newspaper publisher and journalist Joseph Pulitzer established the Pulitzer Prizes in 1911, and the first prize was administered in 1917. In celebration of this year’s centennial [9], the Pulitzer board has partnered with individuals and organizations across the country for its Campfires Initiative [9], which hosts events with the aim “to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by Pulitzer Prize–winning work.”
Nominations for the 2017 prizes will open in May.