The 2026 Pulitzer Prize winners were officially announced on May 4. Now, it’s time to celebrate these remarkable literary works. While books are often the highlight, it’s worth remembering that Columbia University also grants this prestigious award for outstanding achievements in journalism, music, drama and nearly two dozen unique categories. For more details about the history of the prize and past award winners from the first quarter of the 21st century, check out our Guide to the Pulitzer Prize. Here’s a quick look at this year’s winners across each category, from fiction and nonfiction to poetry and drama, along with a note on what makes each author such a standout.
Fiction: Angel Down
by Daniel Kraus
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR - USA TODAY BESTSELLER
The critically acclaimed author of the "crazily enjoyable" (The New York Times) Whalefall returns with an immersive, cinematic novel about five World War I soldiers who stumble upon a fallen angel that could hold the key to ending the war.
Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man's Land to euthanize a wounded comrade.
What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell.
Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder and moral conflict.
About the Author: Daniel Kraus is a powerhouse in the world of speculative fiction. He’s known for masterful horror novels and collaborations with tghe legendary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. The two teamed up to create the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water. Angel Down is a work of paranormal historical fiction. It focuses on five soldiers who encounter a supernatural being who is shot-down over the battlefield. The work is especially unique because it’s told in a single sentence broken into paragraphs and chapters.
General Nonfiction: There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
by Brian Goldstone
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE ATLANTIC'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR - ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America's booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.
In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. Maurice and Natalia make a fresh start in the country's "Black Mecca" after being priced out of DC. Kara dreams of starting her own cleaning business while mopping floors at a public hospital. Britt scores a coveted housing voucher. Michelle is in school to become a social worker. Celeste toils at her warehouse job while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer. Each of them aspires to provide a decent life for their children--and each of them, one by one, joins the ranks of the nation's working homeless.
Through intimate, novelistic portraits, Goldstone reveals the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars, or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. These are the nation's hidden homeless--omitted from official statistics, and proof that overflowing shelters and street encampments are only the most visible manifestation of a far more pervasive problem.
By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness--and shows that it won't be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.
About the Author: Journalist and anthropologist Brian Goldstone was the perfect person to explore the housing crisis due to his extensive background researching housing insecurity and inequality. There Is No Place for Us takes a meticulous and well-researched look at one of our biggest social and institutional crises of our time. This landmark book is an unmissable, gut-wrenching and empathetic piece of modern journalism that’s ideal for readers who enjoy nonfiction and are concerned about pressing social issues.
Biography: Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
by Amanda Vaill
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY - A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN BIOGRAPHY - FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY
If it hadn't been for the Revolutionary War, things might have been very different for the two women Alexander Hamilton came to describe as his "dear brunettes." Angelica and Elizabeth Schuyler, daughters of colonial Hudson Valley aristocracy, would have followed their family's expectations, making dynastic marriages and supervising substantial households, but they didn't. Instead, they became embroiled in the turmoil of America's insurrection against Great Britain, and rebelled themselves, in ways as different as each sister was from the other, against the destiny mapped out for them.
Glamorous Angelica, who sought fulfillment in attachments to powerful men, eloped with a war profiteer and led a luxurious life, charming Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the Prince of Wales. Eliza, too candid for flirtation and uninterested in influence or intrigue, married a penniless outsider, Alexander Hamilton, and devoted herself to his career; but after his appointment as America's first treasury secretary, she was challenged by the public and private controversies that plagued him -- not least of all the attraction that grew between him and her adored sister.
When tragedy followed, everything changed for both women: one was deprived of her animating spirit, while the other gained a new, self-determined life. Drawing on deep archival research, Amanda Vaill interweaves this family drama with its historical context, creating a narrative with the sweep and intimacy of a nineteenth-century novel. Full of battles and dinner parties, murky politics and transparent frocks, fierce loyalties and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life.
About the Author: A talented biographer, journalist and Emmy-nominated screenwriter, Amanda Vaill is known for her vibrant, deeply researched portraits of historical figures. This includes Somewhere, her acclaimed biography of Broadway director and choreographer Jerome Robbins, who brought us classic musicals like Fiddler on the Rood and West Side Story. Vaill is celebrated for her ability to blend historical archives with page-turning gripping narratives. This is exactly what she did to bring the Revolutionary War-era stories of New York’s Schuyler sisters to life.
Memoir: Things in Nature Merely Grow
by Yiyun Li
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR MEMOIR/AUTOBIOGRAPHY - FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION -
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
"There is no good way to say this," Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book. "There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged ... My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home."
There is no good way to say this -- because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a time line." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: doing "things that work," including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.
This is a book for James, but it's not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, "The verb that does not die is 'to be.' Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now." Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li's indomitable spirit.
About the Author: Yiyun Li is no stranger to awards. With a MacArthur Genius Grant, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and Faulkner Foundation Prize under her belt, she’s one of the most decorated contemporary American authors today. Known for her emotionally fearless prose, Li delivers a fierce and unflinching look at grief and the persistence of life in Things in Nature Merely Grow as she explores her experiences following the death of her two sons.
History: We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution
by Jill Lepore
The U.S. Constitution is among the oldest constitutions in the world but also one of the most difficult to amend. Jill Lepore, Harvard professor of history and law, explains why in We the People, the most original history of the Constitution in decades -- and an essential companion to her landmark history of the United States, These Truths.
Arriving on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding -- the anniversary, too, of the first state constitutions -- We the People offers a wholly new history of the Constitution. "One of the Constitution's founding purposes was to prevent change," Lepore writes. "Another was to allow for change without violence." Relying on the extraordinary database she has assembled at the Amendments Project, Lepore recounts centuries of attempts, mostly by ordinary Americans, to realize the promise of the Constitution. Yet nearly all those efforts have failed. Although nearly twelve thousand amendments have been introduced in Congress since 1789, and thousands more have been proposed outside its doors, only twenty-seven have ever been ratified. More troubling, the Constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971. Without recourse to amendment, she argues, the risk of political violence rises. So does the risk of constitutional change by presidential or judicial fiat.
Challenging both the Supreme Court's monopoly on constitutional interpretation and the flawed theory of "originalism," Lepore contends in this "gripping and unfamiliar story of our own past" that the philosophy of amendment is foundational to American constitutionalism. The framers never intended for the Constitution to be preserved, like a butterfly, under glass, Lepore argues, but expected that future generations would be forever tinkering with it, hoping to mend America by amending its Constitution through an orderly deliberative and democratic process.
Lepore's remarkable history seeks, too, to rekindle a sense of constitutional possibility. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes that Lepore "has thrown us a lifeline, a way of seeing the Constitution neither as an authoritarian straitjacket nor a foolproof magic amulet but as the arena of fierce, logical, passionate, and often deadly struggle for a more perfect union." At a time when the Constitution's vulnerability is all too evident, and the risk of political violence all too real, We the People, with its shimmering prose and pioneering research, hints at the prospects for a better constitutional future, an amended America.
About the Author: You may know Jill Lepore from her work at The New Yorker. She’s known for her accessible, lively and narrative-driven histories that pull back the curtain on American myths. She’s been a Pulitzer Prize finalist before, but this time she won for her work untangling the legal and social complexities of the U.S. Constitution, including amendments that were proposed by marginalized groups but never passed.
Drama: Liberation
by Bess Wohl
It's 1970. Somewhere in Ohio, six women meet on a basement basketball court to form a consciousness-raising group, determined to shake up their lives and change the world. Fifty years later, one of their daughters tries to understand where things fell apart.
About the Author: Bess Wohl is a critically acclaimed, Tony-nominated playwright whose works are celebrated for their sharp wit, emotional sincerity and unique theatrical structures. Liberation masterfully blends comedy with genuine heart. She draws on the history of the pro-feminist movements of the 1970s as well as her own mother’s experiences. Liberation entertains and draws the audience into the conversation.
Poetry: Ars Poeticas
by Juliana Spahr
The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry
During the time of an increasingly powerful alt-right which was also the time when species extinction was ever increasing, Juliana Spahr sat down to read Brecht. She was looking for an answer to Brecht's question about the dark times, about whether there will also be singing during the dark times. The answer that Brecht provides is that yes, that poets will sing of the dark times. In the six ars poeticas that Spahr writes, she sings of the dark times but also of coral, the pop song's possible liberation, and the love of comrades. She writes not only of the rich history of what politics and poetry have done with each other, but what they might yet do together.
About the Author: Inspired by Bertolt Brecht, Ars Poeticas is a collection of long-form poems that explores how the creative flame endures and even brightens in dark times. Spahr uses her background in politics, ecology, activism and language to explore climate change, political disillusionment and the complex relationship between art, literature and our sense of community.