Barbara Kingsolver, Hernan Diaz share fiction Pulitzer Prize

New York, May 9

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded on Monday to two class-conscious novels: ‘Demon Copperhead’, Barbara Kingsolver’s modern recasting of the Dickens classic “David Copperfield,” and Hernan Diaz’s ‘Trust’, an innovative narrative of wealth and deceit set in 1920s New York.

Beverly Gage’s ‘G-Man’, her widely acclaimed book on long-time FBI leader J Edgar Hoover, was given the Pulitzer for biography. ‘His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice’, by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, won for general nonfiction.

Sanaz Toossi’s play ‘English’ won for drama and Jefferson Cowie’s ‘Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power’ was honoured for history.

The Pulitzer board hailed ‘English’ as “a quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran, where family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life”.      

The Pulitzer for memoir or autobiography was given to Hua Hsu’s coming-of-age story ‘Stay True’.

One of the country’s most highly regarded poets, Carl Phillips, won in poetry for ‘Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020’.

‘Omar’, by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, won the Pulitzer for music.