Film critic Justin Chang won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for criticism on Monday for varied and “richly evocative” work that telegraphs how Americans see movies now.
The New Yorker‘s current film critic won the prize on Monday for his 2023 work at the Los Angeles Times, where he worked until early 2024. Other nominees in the category included novelist and essayist Zadie Smith, who was nominated for her New York Review of Books review of the 2022 film Tar, and The New Yorker‘s theater critic Vinson Cunningham for a number of reviews that evinced “a formidable knowledge of the stage and the mechanics of performance along with canny observations on the human condition.”
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During the 2024 ceremony, the late cultural critic Greg Tate — who wrote for The Village Voice and Rolling Stone — also received a special citation for his work. “His language, cribbed from literature, academia, popular culture and hip-hop was as influential as the content of his ideas,” Miller said in Monday’s announcement. She added that Tate’s “aesthetic, innovations, and intellectual originality, particularly in his pioneering hip-hop criticism, continue to influence subsequent generations, especially writers and critics of color.” Tate died in 2021.
Administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes Marjorie Miller announced the 2024 winners and nominees of the awards, considered the most prestigious honor in journalism, on Monday at Columbia University. Winners of the prizes, which span 15 journalism categories and eight letters, drama and music categories, receive $15,000 as an award with one exception: The winner of the public service category receives a gold medal instead.
During the ceremony, the breaking news Pulitzer went to the staff of Lookout Santa Cruz for reporting on the 2023 January floods that had catastrophic local effects and the investigative reporting Pulitzer was awarded to New York Times writer Hannah Dreier for a series of stories exposing migrant child labor in the U.S. The public service award went to ProPublica for its series of stories exploring Supreme Court justices’ ties to billionaires, while the national reporting prize was awarded to the Reuters staff for investigative reporting on Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla businesses.
In the arts categories, author Jayne Anne Phillips won the fiction prize for her novel Night Watch and Jacqueline Jones won the history prize for her book No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era. Jonathan Eig and Ilyon Woo shared the biography Pulitzer for their books King: A Life and Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey From Slavery to Freedom, respectively, while Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust won the drama prize and Tyshawn Sorey’s “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)” clinched the music award.
