The Nickel Boys, a spare yet harrowing novel by Colson Whitehead that described the abuse of young boys at a Florida boarding school for delinquent youth during the Jim Crow era, has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The two runners-up, announced online on Monday, were The Dutch House by Ann Padgett and The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. The Pulitzer Board described The Nickel Boys as”ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.” It is the sixth novel by the 50-year-old Whitehead and the second of his to win a Pulitzer; The Underground Railroad won the prize for fiction in 2017.
In his review of The Nickel Boys for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote of Whitehead that he “applies a master storyteller’s muscle not just to excavating a grievous past but to examining the process by which Americans undermine, distort, hide or ‘neatly erase’ the stories he is driven to tell.”
A Strange Loop, by Michael R. Jackson, described by the Pulitzer board as “a metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality” won the prize for Drama. The two other finalists were Heroes of the Fourth Turning by Will Arbery and the musical Soft Power, by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori.
Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, by W. Caleb McDaniel won the prize for History and Sontag: Her Life and Work, by Benjamin Moser — “an authoritatively constructed work told with pathos and grace, that captures the writer’s genius and humanity alongside her addictions, sexual ambiguities and volatile enthusiasms” — won the Pulitzer for biography.
In the journalism categories, The New York Times and The New Yorker were the two big winners. The Times won three awards: Commentary to Nikole-Hannah Jones, for her essay for the “1619 Project;” International Reporting to the foreign staff of the paper, for “a set of enthralling stories, reported at great risk, exposing the predations of Vladimir Putin’s regime;” and Investigative Reporting to Brian M. Rosenthal, for a six-part exposé of New York City’s taxi industry “that showed how lenders profited from predatory loans that shattered the lives of vulnerable drivers.”
The New Yorker won two awards, for Feature Writing and Cartooning. The Feature Writing prize went to Ben Taub, a staff writer at the magazine since 2017, for “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret,’ which the citation called “a devastating account of a man who was kidnapped, tortured and deprived of his liberty for more than a decade at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.” And Barry Blitt, who has been contributing to the magazine for three decades, won in the editorial-cartooning category for work that included several magazine covers and an array of cartoons published online.
Two years ago, the Times and The New Yorker shared the prize for Public Interest for their respective reporting on the #MeToo movement.