Rapper Kendrick Lamar among Pulitzer prize winners
NEW YORK — Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, the comic and misbegotten adventures of a middleage novelist, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday.
Greer’s novel didn’t receive the same attention as Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, winner of the National Book Award, or George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo. But it was widely praised as poignant and funny and was ranked among the year’s best by the Washington Post, which called it an “elegantly” told story of a man who “loses everything: his lover, his suitcase, his beard, his dignity.”
It wasn’t the only surprise arts winner.
Pulitzer judges upended decades of giving the music prize to classical or jazz artists and honoured Kendrick Lamar for DAMN.
The rapper is also the most commercially successful musician to receive the award, usually reserved for critically acclaimed classical acts who don’t live on the pop charts.
The 30-year-old’s raw and powerful DAMN is also a Grammywinning album. The Pulitzer board said the album is a “virtuosic song collection” and said it captures “the modern African American life.”
The drama prize went to Martyna Majok for Cost of Living. Carolyn Fraser’s work on author Laura Ingalls Wilder, Prairie Fires, won for biography. Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf won for history, while the general nonfiction prize went to James Forman Jr’s Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.
The Pulitzers judges wrote that Forman’s work draws on “vast experience and deep knowledge of the legal system, and its often-devastating consequences for citizens and communities of colour.”
Frank Bidart’s Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, winner of a National Book Award last fall, received the Pulitzer for poetry. Bidart turns 80 next month.
The Pulitzers were announced at Columbia University, which administers the prizes. This is the 102nd year of the contest, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.
Winners of the public service award receive a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of $15,000 each US.