Pulitzer Prize Winners Books, Drama, Literature 2017

The Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917 to recognize excellence and achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States. Here are the winners for the books, drama and literature categories for 2017:

  • Fiction: “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday), for exploring the country’s history of slavery in both realism and allegory
  • Drama: “Sweat,” by Lynn Notttage, which explored workers in an industrial town searching for the American dream
  • History: “Blood in the Water” by Heather Ann Thompson (Pantheon), which explored the 1971 Attica prison uprising and police brutality
  • Biography or Autobiography: “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between,” by Hisham Matar (Random House), an elegy for home and a father
  • Poetry: “Olio,” by Tyehimba Jess, for its exploration of memory, race and identity
  • General Nonfiction: “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” by Matthew Desmond, which investigated the mass evictions in the U.S. after the financial crash
  • Music: “Angel’s Bone” by Du Yun, an operatic work about human trafficking