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 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 theater season that saw most venues largely shuttered.
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The drama award, which includes a USD 15,000 prize, is “for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.” The Pulitzer board hailed “The Hot Wing King” for its look at masculinity and how it is filtered “by the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition” Finalists included “Circle Jerk” by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley,” and “Stew” by Zora Howard.
With most theaters closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer Prize Board altered the requirements for this year’s drama award, allowing postponed or cancelled works, as well as plays produced and performed in places other than theaters, including online, outside or in site-specific venues during calendar 2020.
“The Hot Wing King” opened off-Broadway just days before the city’s theaters were closed.
Hall is the author of the Olivier Award-winning “The Mountaintop” and is a Tony Award-nominated co- playwright of Broadway’s “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.” Previous playwrights honored include August Wilson, Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Recent winners include Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” Ayad Akhtar’s “Disgraced,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.”
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