The 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday by Columbia University, which administers the awards, considered one of the great honors in journalism and literature. In the entertainment world, Justin Chang took home a Pulitzer for criticism, across fields, for his work as a film critic at the Los Angeles Times, where he worked for nearly eight years. He left earlier this year to join the New Yorker. The prizes also come with a $15,000 award in most categories.
Chang was honored “for richly evocative and genre-spanning film criticism that reflects on the contemporary moviegoing experience,” according to the Pulitzer Prize board. Chang is also a critic for NPR’s “Fresh Air.” He previously worked at Variety, where he began as an intern before rising to become the publication’s chief film critic.
He beat out fellow finalists Zadie Smith for her “Tár” review in The New York Review of Books, as well as Vinson Cunningham, nominated for her theater reviews for The New Yorker.
A special citation was also awarded to the late writer and hip-hop critic Greg Tate, who wrote for The Village Voice and other publications. He died in 2021.
The Pulitzer Board praised his “language — cribbed from literature, academia, popular culture and hip-hop,” adding that it “was as influential as the content of his ideas. 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 other special citation was given to journalists and media covering the war in Gaza. The Pulitzer Prize board have awarded other citations in recent years to journalists covering wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan.
“Under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and others in Gaza. 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,” the board wrote.
The New York Times’ staff won its own International Reporting Pulitzer for its coverage of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, failures of Israeli intelligence and coverage of what it described as “the Israeli military’s sweeping, deadly response in Gaza.” The Reuters staff won a Breaking News Photography Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent response.
Among other notable awards this year, ProPublica won the Public Service Pulitzer for its coverage of the Supreme Court and the influence of billionaires providing justices with gifts and travel. One of the National Reporting prizes went to the staff of Reuters for its series of stories examining Elon Musk and his car and aerospace businesses, which the board noted led to probes of his companies both domestically and in Europe. The other National Reporting prize went to the Washington Post for its examination of the AR-15 assault rifle.
Read the full list of this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners below. You can also watch the video announcement of the winners above.
JOURNALISM
- Public Service — ProPublica
- Breaking News Reporting — Staff of Lookout Santa Cruz
- Investigative Reporting — Hannah Dreier of The New York Times
- Explanatory Reporting — Sarah Stillman of The New Yorker
- Local Reporting — Sarah Conway of City Bureau and Trina Reynolds-Tyler of the Invisible Institute
- National Reporting — Staff of Reuters
- Staff of The Washington Post
- International Reporting — Staff of The New York Times
- Feature Writing — Katie Engelhart, contributing writer, The New York Times
- Commentary — Vladimir Kara-Murza, contributor, The Washington Post
- Criticism — Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times
- Editorial Writing — David E. Hoffman of The Washington Post
- Illustrated Reporting and Commentary —
- Medar de la Cruz, contributor, The New Yorker
- Breaking News Photography — Photography Staff of Reuters
- Feature Photography — Photography Staff of Associated Press
- Audio Reporting — Staffs of the Invisible Institute and USG Audio
Letters and Drama
- Fiction — Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
- Drama — Primary Trust by Eboni Booth
- History — No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggle of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era by Jacqueline Jones (Basic Books)
- Biography — King: A Life by Jonathan Eig (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo (Simon & Schuster)
- Memoir or Autobiography — Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza (Hogarth)
- Poetry — Tripas: Poems by Brandon Som (Georgia Review Books)
- General Nonfiction — A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy by Nathan Thrall (Metropolitan Books)
Music
- Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) by Tyshawn Sorey, premiered on March 16, 2023 at Atlanta Symphony Hall.
Special Citations
- Greg Tate
- Journalists and Media Workers Covering the War in Gaza
