Prizes given in arts and letters
Playwright Martyna Majok, novelist Andrew Sean Greer, others win Pulitzers.
“Damn.” Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar’s critically acclaimed album by that name may have won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for music, commanding the media spotlight with a historic victory in a traditionally staid category, but plenty of other compelling works in arts and letters also took home awards Monday.
Among them was Andrew Sean Greer in the Pulitzer fiction category for his sixth book, “Less.” Greer, a novelist and short-story writer living in the Bay Area, wrote a global journey of a man running from his middle-age demons.
The Pulitzer committee called the novel “a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.”
The National Book Review’s Chiara Barzini wrote of the book, “This is no ‘Eat Pray Love’ story of touristic uplift, but rather a grand travelogue of foibles, humiliations and self-deprecation, ending in joy and a dollop of self-knowledge.”
Martyna Majok won the Pulitzer for drama for “Cost of Living.” The play, presented off-Broadway by Manhattan Theatre Club after premiering at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, explores the lives of four individuals: a man with cerebral palsy and his new caregiver, and a quadriplegic woman and her ex-husband.
New York Times theater critic Jesse Green wrote of the production, “it would be a mistake to see ‘Cost of Living ’ as an identity play about people with disabilities. Rather, it’s a play about disabilities with people. In both of its stories, which eventually collide, the biggest handicaps are the universal ones: fear and disconnection.”
The Pulitzer committee lauded the play as “an honest, original work that invites audiences to examine diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection.” Majok, a Polish-born playwright raised in the United States, has seen her
work presented at LCT3/ Lincoln Center in New York, Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. and La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.
The Pulitzer for biography went to Caroline Fraser for “Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder,” which the committee called “a deeply researched and elegantly written portrait” of the “Little House on the Prairie” author “that describes how Wilder transformed her family’s story of poverty, failure and struggle into an uplifting tale of self-reliance, familial love and perseverance.”
Other winners: in history, Jack E. Davis for “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea”; in poetry, Frank Bidart for “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016”; and in general nonfiction, James Forman Jr. for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.”
Lamar was the first hiphop artist to win the Pulitzer’s music category, which traditionally has honored classical works, even after the category was opened to jazz and pop in 2005. Jazz master Ornette Coleman won in 2007, but the selection of Lamar is the Pulitzer’s biggest swing toward popular music.
Finalists in the category were “Quartet” by Michael Gilbertson and “Sound From the Bench” by Ted Hearne.
Finalists in fiction were “In the Distance” by Hernan Diaz and “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman; in drama, “Everybody” by Brandon JacobJenkins and “The Minutes” by Tracy Letts. Finalists in history were “Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics” by Kim Phillips-Fein and “Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America” by Steven J. Ross; in biography, “Richard Nixon: The Life” by John A. Farrell and “Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character” by Kay Redfield Jamison. The finalists in poetry were “Incendiary Art” by Patricia Smith and “Semiautomatic” by Evie Shockley; and in general nonfiction, “Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-America World” by Suzy Hansen and “The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World — and Us” by Richard O. Prum.