NEW YORK (AP) — Stories of race, slavery and the Civil War, real and invented, were the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.
“Night Watch” by Jayne Anne Phillips, a mother-daughter saga set in a West Virginia asylum just after the war, won in the fiction category. Jacqueline Jones received the history award for “No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era,” and Ilyon Woo’s “Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom” won in the category. of biography.
Phillips, a West Virginia native who often sets her books in her home state, sees “Night Watch” as the third in a trilogy of novels about the war, following the Vietnam-era narrative “Machine Dreams” and the Korean War story “Lark & Termite,” which is based in part on a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press investigation into the No Gun Ri massacre.
He started “Night Watch” eight years ago, and found the Civil War era increasingly uncomfortably timely.
“The Civil War still has an enormous hold on this country,” he said. “I hope that people can take a piece of fiction and put aside its politics and be able to feel what it was like for people at the time.”
Jones, a long-time faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin who has been a Pulitzer 2 finalist twice before, noted that there is still much to be written about the Civil War because until recently narratives focused on the battlefield. He began working on “No Right to an Honest Living” because he wondered how black people were treated in Boston at a time when the city was a center of anti-slavery activism.
“It turns out that radical abolitionists represented a very small minority in Boston and that the social division of labor was really discriminatory,” he said.
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy,” by Nathan Thrall, in which the life of a child is lost in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, won in the general nonfiction category. Mexican Cristina Rivera Garza’s investigation into her sister’s murder, “Liliana’s Invincible Summer,” originally published in Spanish as “El invincible summer of Liliana,” won in the memoir-autobiography category, while “Tripas,” by Brandon Som, received the poetry prize. Tyshawn Sorey’s saxophone concerto “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)” was the winner in the music category.
The drama prize was awarded to Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust,” about a black bookstore worker’s unexpected journey after losing his lifelong job, while Jonathan Eig received a second biography prize for his story about Martin Luther King “King”.
Booth, who is originally from New York and graduated from the University of Vermont and Juilliard’s playwriting program, got her start as a stage actress and has also written for Hulu’s “We Were the Lucky Ones” and HBO Max’s “Julia.” .
His work is about a lonely adult man with an imaginary friend who frequently drinks at a tiki bar until he is helped by some residents of his small town outside of Rochester, New York.
“I think I’m drawn to stories of loneliness and people who try to struggle, even silently, with the feeling of being isolated,” Booth told the Roundabout Theater Company, which produced “Primary Trust” off Broadway in mid-June. from last year.
The Pulitzers awarded the best of 2023 journalism and artistic categories focused on books, music and theater.
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AP writer Mark Kennedy contributed from New York.
