Other categories also saw major media-reported winners. Jill Lepore won the history prize for 'We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution', Amanda Vaill won biography for 'Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution', and Yiyun Li won memoir-autobiography for 'Things in Nature Merely Grow', which recounts the suicides of her two sons. Brian Goldstone won general nonfiction for 'There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America', Juliana Spahr won poetry for 'Ars Poeticas', and Gabriela Lena Frank won music for 'Picaflor: A Future Myth', a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires. The finalists in each category have not been announced.
Kraus's 'Angel Down' is a World War I narrative told in one long sentence, according to reports. Pulitzer officials described it as 'a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.' Kraus, 50, has collaborated with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Wohl's 'Liberation' is about second-wave feminists in the 1970s and includes six actors disrobing for the Act 2 opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony Award nominations, and 'Liberation' is expected to be named in the best new play category. The Guardian's Adrian Horton praised the play in a four-star review, describing it as provocative and noting that it asks questions about personal politics and choices.
a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence
The play offers no concrete answers; one’s personal politics and choices remain, as ever, a thicket of contradictions. Liberation finds, in that, an immutable and potent grief – for the costs of our failings, for all that’s been lost, for the questions we thought too late to ask. But that doesn’t mean, as this provocative play suggests, that we shouldn’t still ask them.