Winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize

The acclaimed writer Joseph Pulitzer founded this prize in 1917. Since 1984, the president of Columbia University has awarded Pulitzer Prize winners with their honors during a luncheon held in May in the Low Library's rotunda. Guests in attendance include family members, business associates, board members, and the School of Journalism faculty. 

1. Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall

Immersive and compelling, this is a personal account of a fatal accident outside of Jerusalem that, in the course of one illuminating and devastating day, reveals a web of lives, loves, enmities, and history. Nathan Thrall, praised for his acute sensitivity to conventional knowledge, provides a profoundly human portrayal of the conflict between Israel and Palestine in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, providing readers with fresh insight into the terrible past and present of one of the world's most disputed regions.

2. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips

A captivating tale of a mother and daughter seeking safety in the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War from one of our most outstanding novels. Night Watch is an epic, captivating, and painstakingly written account of a family's perseverance in the face of adversity as well as a breathtaking account of surviving war and its aftermath.

3. Pulitzer Prize for Memoir/Autobiography: Liliana's Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza

One of Mexico's best living authors presents an eerie, gripping memoir about an adored younger sister and the terrible memory of her murder. Following the whole story of their upbringing and adolescence in central Mexico, as well as the traumatic and perplexing years following Liliana's passing, Rivera Garza addresses the trauma of losing her sister and looks at the ways in which this tragedy continues to influence who she is and the causes she fights for to this day.

4. Pulitzer Prize for History: No Right to an Honest Living by Jacqueline Jones

A terrifying depiction of Black laborers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston comes from a Bancroft Prize winner. Historian Jacqueline Jones describes how Boston was the United States blown large, where fairness in the workplace was difficult but the lofty language of egalitarianism was easy to swallow in No Right to an Honest Living. Black Bostonians were mostly condemned to poverty before, during, and after the Civil War because white abolitionists and Republicans refused to provide them with equitable work opportunities. Nevertheless, Jones discovers that some Black businesspeople cleverly paved their own professional routes and built their own positions. 

5. Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Tripas by Brandon Som

After his critically acclaimed debut, Tripas, Brandon Som returns with a book of poetry inspired by his multicultural, multigenerational childhood home. In it, he pays tribute to his Chinese American father and grandparents, who owned the family corner store, as well as his Chicana grandmother, who worked nights on the Motorola assembly line. putting on a dialogic poetry-making performance known as "cómo se dice poetics," which creatively records family memories by listening to heritage languages. A world otherwise, one attuned to the echo in the hecho, the oracle in the órale, is imagined by Som's lyricism, which weaves together the narratives of his transnational communities. Som's lyricism is invested in the circuitry and circuitous routes of migration and labor.