2015 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced
April 23, 2015
The winners of the 99th Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week by Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. The awards are given in the United States each year for distinguished achievement in journalism, literature, drama, and music.
The public service prize in 2015 went to The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, for its series that probed the high number of women’s deaths resulting from domestic abuse in South Carolina. The staff of The Seattle Times won the breaking news reporting prize for its online account of the March 2014 landslide that killed 43 people near Oso in northwestern Washington. Two prizes were awarded for investigative reporting. The staff of The Wall Street Journal won the prize for a project that revealed to Americans previously confidential data on the motivations and practices of their health care providers. Eric Lipton of The New York Times won for his reports that showed how the influence of lobbyists can sway congressional leaders and state attorneys general, slanting justice toward the wealthy and connected.
Zachary R. Mider of Bloomberg News won the explanatory reporting prize for his coverage of how many American corporations dodge taxes and why lawmakers and regulators have a hard time stopping them. Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kimitch, and Frank Suraci of the Daily Breeze, of Torrance, California, shared the local reporting prize for their investigation into widespread corruption in a small, cash-strapped school district. Carol D. Leonnig of The Post of Washington, D.C., won the national reporting prize for her examination of security lapses within the U.S. Secret Service. The staff of The New York Times won the international reporting prize for its reporting and human-interest stories on the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. Diana Marcum of the Los Angeles Times won the feature-writing prize for her dispatches from California’s Central Valley providing portraits of lives affected by the state’s drought.
Lisa Falkenberg of the Houston Chronicle won the commentary award for her columns on grand jury abuses that led to a wrongful conviction and other problems in the legal and immigration systems. Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times won for television criticism. Kathleen Kingsbury of The Boston Globe won for editorial writing. Adam Zyglis of The Buffalo News of New York won for editorial cartooning. The staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch won for breaking news photography for its powerful images of despair and anger in Ferguson, Missouri, after an unarmed black teenager was shot by a white police officer in 2014. Daniel Berehulak, freelance photographer for The New York Times, won for feature photography for his photographs of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
Health workers pray before the start of their shift in Liberia in 2014. Daniel Berehulak was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography on April 20, 2015, for his coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa for The New York Times. Credit: © Daniel Berehulak, The New York Times/Redux Pictures
Anthony Doerr won the fiction-writing award for All the Light We Cannot See, a novel set during World War II that concerns a blind French girl and her German friend. Stephen Adly Guirgis won the drama prize for Between Riverside and Crazy, which centers on a retired policeman. Elizabeth A. Fenn won the history award for Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, a Native American Indian tribe in the Dakotas. David I. Kertzer won the biography award for The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe. Gregory Pardlo won the poetry prize for Digest, the poet’s second volume of poetry. Elizabeth Kolbert won the nonfiction prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, an analysis of climate change and modern-day extinctions. Julia Wolfe won the prize in music for Anthracite Fields, an oratorio about coal miners.
The Columbia University School of Journalism was founded in 1912, and the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established the prizes. Nearly all of the Pulitzer Prizes have a value of $10,000. The only exception is the prize for public service in journalism. The winner of that award receives a gold medal.
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