Feminism play Liberation and first world war novel Angel Down among Pulitzer winners | Pulitzer prize
Pulitzer Prize officials awarded the fiction prize to an author with a long history of fantasy, horror, and young adult novels: Daniel Kraus, quoted on behalf of Angel Down, a World War I story unfolding in one long sentence. Liberation, Bess Wohl’s look at feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s, won the drama award.
Among the winners announced Monday were two books with roots in the founding of the United States. Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the US Constitution won first place in the history category, while Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution won first place in the biography category.
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, her frank account of the suicides of her two sons, has been cited as a memoir-autobiography. Brian Goldstone’s No Room for Us: The Working and Homeless in America won for general nonfiction.
The poetry award was given to Juliana Spahr’s work Ars Poeticas, while the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for Picaflor: A Future Myth, a symphonic work inspired by Andean legends and California forest fires.
Kraus, 50, has had a diverse and prolific career that includes collaborations with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Pulitzer officials praised Angel Down as “a stylistic tour de force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole told in a single sentence.”
Wohl’s memory play brings together second-wave feminists from all walks of life who struggle with misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic violence, and gender roles. The play moves back and forth between past and present, as six of the actors undress for the opening scene of the second act. The win comes a day before Tony award nominations, where Liberation is expected to be named in the best new play category.
The Guardian’s Adrian Horton praised Liberation in his four-star review.
“The play offers no concrete answers; one’s personal politics and choices remain, as always, a tangle of contradictions,” he wrote. “Salvation finds in this a constant and powerful pain – for the price of our failures, for everything we have lost, for the questions we thought it was too late to ask. But that does not mean that we should not still ask them, as this provocative play suggests.”
