‘The Night Watchman,’ Malcolm X biography win arts Pulitzers
The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall, a play set around a hot wing cooking competition, won the prize for drama during a theatre season that saw most venues largely shuttered.
New York: One of the country’s most esteemed novelists, Louise Erdrich, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Night Watchman. Other winners for books include the late Les Payne and daughter Tamara Payne for their Malcolm X biography The Dead Are Arising.
The awards were announced on Friday during a remote ceremony that honoured the best work in journalism and the arts in 2020, a year upended by the coronavirus pandemic, the racial reckoning after the police killing of George Floyd and the US presidential election.
Marcia Chatelain’s Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won for history. Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem was the poetry winner and David Zucchino’s Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy was cited for general nonfiction.
Tania León composition Stride won for music.
The judges commended for being “a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the US and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric”.
The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall, a play set around a hot wing cooking competition, won the prize for drama during a theatre season that saw most venues largely shuttered.