Kendrick Lamar, Frank Bidart, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, and others win 2018 Pulitzer Prizes
American rapper and songwriter, Kendrick Lamar, has emerged one of the winners of the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes. Lamar’s album DAMN. won him the award in the music category. Released last April, DAMN. has been praised as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life”.
In January, DAMN. won Lamar a Grammy for best rap album, and now it’s the first rap album to win a Pulitzer Prize. Speaking about the fourteen-track album, Clay Cane of CNN said: “DAMN is a punch in the gut, a wake-up call to people who are in intellectual comas. The Pulitzer honor goes to Lamar … it signifies so much more: blackness and the revolutionary spirit, not respectability politics, and you would have to be soulless to not feel and hear him. He is the soundtrack of youth culture today and that is why the country should be listening.”
Announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners was made at Columbia University by the Pulitzer administrator, Dana Canedy.
Geared towards “honoring excellence in journalism and the arts,” the Pulitzer Prizes of the year go to the following winners in their various categories:
Public Service: The New York Times, for reporting led by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, and The New Yorker, for reporting by Ronan Farrow
Breaking News Reporting: Staff of The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa
Investigative Reporting: Staff of The Washington Post
Explanatory Reporting: Staffs of The Arizona Republic and USA Today Network
Local Reporting: The Cincinnati Enquirer Staff
National Reporting: Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post
International Reporting: Claire Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Manuel Mogato of Reuters
Feature Writing: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, freelance reporter
Commentary: John Archibald of Alabama Media Group
Criticism: Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine
Editorial Writing: Andie Dominick of The Des Moines Register
Editorial Cartooning: Jake Halpern, freelance writer, and Michael Sloan, freelance cartoonist, The New York Times
Breaking News Photography: Ryan Kelly of The Daily Progress
Feature Photography: Photography Staff of Reuters
Fiction: Less, by Andrew Sean Greer
Drama: Cost of Living, by Martyna Majok
History: The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, by Jack E. Davis
Biography: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser
Poetry: Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart
General Nonfiction: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr.
Music: DAMN., by Kendrick Lamar
Each winner receives the cash amount of $15,000.
