Biography, Fiction, History, Music, Nonfiction, Poetry Winners Announced

By Michael Bandler

Pulitzer Prize for Drama Honors Play About Women in Wartime Congo

Washington - The African-American women characters created by playwright Lynn Nottage populate a vast expanse in terms of social class, time and place: a teenage girl in 1950s Brooklyn, a pretentious businesswoman, a seamstress, an affluent traveler in search of her African roots, a group of women brutalized during the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

As different as they are, Nottage's protagonists are inexorably bound together - a vibrant, indomitable sorority of sorts that sets a standard not just for African-American women, not just for women, but for humanity as a whole.

Now Nottage's play, Ruined, set in a Congolese brothel populated by women seeking shelter from the horrors of war, has been named winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2008 after the play's premiere, critic Hedy Weiss hailed Ruined as "a brash, searing, heart-of-darkness story, periodically shot through with moments of fearsome comedy and the redemptive spirit that suggests the sheer persistence of the life force."

Nottage - a Yale University professor who received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2007 - is the second African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, after Suzan-Lori Parks in 2002. Nottage said she plans to donate part of her $10,000 prize to the Panzi Hospital in the Congo, which does reconstructive surgery for women.

Joining Nottage as Pulitzer Prize honorees in arts and letters, announced April 20, were novelist Elizabeth Strout, composer Steve Reich, poet W.S. Merwin, historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Douglas A. Blackmon, and biographer Jon Meacham.

The Pulitzer board praised Ruined as "a searing drama" that "compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness."

In a recent interview, Nottage spoke about the Congolese women she had consulted as part of her research for Ruined, citing their shared resilience in the face of unimaginable hardship. "Despite the horrific things that they'd been through," all of the women "were still able to find humor and smile and were determined to survive," she said. "I thought I was going to find broken women, but I found women who had been brutalized but were determined to move on."

Gordon-Reed is the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for history. Her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, explores three generations of a slave family in 19th-century America, with specific attention to the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and his slave (and suspected mistress) Sally Hemings, who was probably the mother of several of his children.

The prize for general nonfiction was awarded to Blackmon for his sober depiction of the lives of African Americans from the Civil War through the late 1940s, in Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. The Pulitzer board called it "a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity."

Meacham, editor of Newsweek magazine, won the biography award for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, his portrayal of the tempestuous, often contradictory man who was the seventh U.S. president. Meacham's focus is on the shift in presidential power that took place during Jackson's tenure from 1829 to 1837, underscored by the onetime Indian fighter's belief in what the author terms "the primacy of the will of the common people."

Strout received the fiction award for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of interrelated short stories forming a novel. Set in Maine, its central character is a seventh-grade math teacher, and it combines depictions of three decades in the lives of Olive and her family with descriptions of the rugged landscape around them. In this setting, loneliness and loss are offset by humor and hope.

The avant-garde Reich, a much-honored musician frequently described as America's greatest living composer, is as much indebted to the textures, rhythms and structure of non-Western music as he is to traditional Western classical music. He received the Pulitzer Prize in music for Double Sextet, a three-movement work featuring two identical ensembles - flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and vibraphone - interlocking to produce an overall pattern.

For Merwin, 81, this year's Pulitzer Prize for poetry is his second. He was awarded the prize in 1971 for a collection of poems entitled The Carrier of Ladders. The 2009 Pulitzer honors him for The Shadow of Sirius, a quiet, contemplative, highly personal collection that focuses on such fundamental aspects of life as childhood, mortality and memory.

The Pulitzer prizes are awarded in journalism as well as in arts and letters. The 2009 honors for reportage covered such topics as wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, last year's U.S. presidential campaign, political issues in several U.S. states, and devastation caused by hurricanes and wildfires.

The Pulitzers are awarded each April by the trustees of Columbia University, on the recommendations of an advisory board composed of journalists, art and literary critics, cultural specialists and others. The prizes are funded through a bequest left by Joseph Pulitzer - an early 20th-century newspaper publisher - to the university trustees.

2009 PULITZER PRIZES - ARTS AND LETTERS:

Fiction: Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout

Drama: Ruined, by Lynn Nottage

History: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed

Biography: American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, by Jon Meacham

Poetry: The Shadow of Sirius, by W.S. Merwin

General Nonfiction: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon

Music: Double Sextet, by Steve Reich

For more information, visit the Pulitzer Prize ( http://www.pulitzer.org/ ) Web site.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)