Photography Pulitzer for Coverage of Refugee Crisis
The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for public service on Monday for a series that exposed slavery and vicious abuse in the Southeast Asia fishing trade, leading to the release of 2,000 captives and broad reforms in the United States and overseas.
The series, “Seafood From Slaves,” involved a sprawling reportorial effort across several countries that discovered scores of fishermen in captivity — and sometimes locked in cages — in an industry that supplies seafood to American restaurants, pet-food brands and big retailers like Walmart. The A.P.’s reporting prompted arrests, ship seizures and action by the federal government.
One year after magazines became eligible in some Pulitzer categories, The New Yorker received two prizes: for Emily Nussbaum’s television criticism, and for “The Really Big One,” Kathryn Schulz’s ominous article about the potential for a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, which won for feature writing. William Finnegan, a New Yorker staff writer, won the biography award for his memoir, “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.”
In an honor that was widely predicted, the musical “Hamilton,” a hip-hop retelling of the founding fathers story, received the prize for drama. The musical’s creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, reacted joyfully on Twitter, writing: “PULITZER?!”
Alissa J. Rubin, the Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, won the prize for international reporting, for a deep examination of the abuse and injustice faced by women in Afghanistan. “I always am curious what people who are usually invisible are thinking, and how they see the world,” Ms. Rubin said in the Times newsroom on Monday.
The Times also won the award for breaking news photography, its third photography prize in three years. Four Times photographers — Tyler Hicks, Mauricio Lima, Sergey Ponomarev and Daniel Etter — won for a searing collection of images of migrants seeking asylum in Europe, sharing the prize with the news agency Reuters. It was Mr. Hicks’s second Pulitzer; he won in 2014 in the same category, for his photos of the terrorist attack at the Westgate mall in Kenya.
The Times had 10 finalists over all, the newspaper’s most since 2002, when it was recognized for coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
2016 Pulitzer Prize Winners
The Pulitzers are in their centennial year, and the winners announced on Monday reflected in part the changes sweeping the media landscape. Here is the full list.
The Pulitzers are now in their centennial year, and the winners announced by Columbia University on Monday reflected some of the changes sweeping the media landscape. Among the winners was The Marshall Project, an online outlet founded 17 months ago. The Washington Post took the national reporting prize for a project that used data, graphics and other tools of digital journalism to chronicle every killing by a police officer in 2015, unearthing fresh insights into a subject that has dominated the national political debate.
Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project and T. Christian Miller of the online investigative news site ProPublica won the explanatory reporting prize for their harrowing account of a botched rape investigation. The article, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” revealed how the police dismissed a claim of rape by an 18-year-old woman, and even prosecuted her for an ostensibly false report — a decision that delayed for years the capture of her actual attacker, a serial rapist. The piece is now being cited in training programs for law enforcement.
Two other newspapers besides The Times won two prizes apiece. Farah Stockman of The Boston Globe, who recently joined the Times staff, won the commentary prize for columns examining the legacy of busing and segregation in Boston; Jessica Rinaldi of The Globe won in the feature photography category for her photos of a young boy struggling after a history of abuse.
The Tampa Bay Times won for local reporting for its look at the stunning failure rates among black students in a Florida county school system that abandoned racial integration. The newspaper also shared the investigative reporting prize with The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, for a joint exposé on abuse and neglect in Florida mental hospitals.
The Los Angeles Times won in the breaking news category for its coverage of the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., in December. Jack Ohman of The Sacramento Bee received the award for editorial cartooning, and John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers of Charlotte Harbor, Fla., won for editorial writing.
The award for fiction went to Viet Thanh Nguyen for his debut novel, “The Sympathizer,” which opens in 1975 in Saigon and centers on a Communist sympathizer who escapes to Los Angeles and spies on a South Vietnamese group he has infiltrated. The novel was hailed by critics for blending espionage, satire and historical fiction.
“Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS,” by Joby Warrick, a reporter for The Washington Post, won the nonfiction prize. The book explores the rise of the Islamic State, in part through a detailed portrait of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the group’s founder, who was killed in an American airstrike in 2006.
T. J. Stiles, a biographer who won a Pulitzer in 2010 for his portrayal of Cornelius Vanderbilt, won this year’s prize in history, for “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America.” Mr. Stiles’s book is a biography of George Armstrong Custer, the Civil War general who died in the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana in 1876.