One of the country’s most esteemed novelists, Louise Erdrich, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Night Watchman.”
ByThe Associated Press
June 11, 2021, 5:47 PM
• 3 min read
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterEmail this articleNEW YORK -- One of the country’s most esteemed novelists, Louise Erdrich, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “The Night Watchman.”
Other winners for books include the late Les Payne and daughter Tamara Payne for their Malcolm X biography “The Dead Are Arising.”
The awards were announced Friday during a remote ceremony that honored the best work in journalism and the arts in 2020, a year upended by the coronavirus pandemic, the racial reckoning after the police killing of George Floyd and the U.S. presidential election.
Erdrich has drawn on her Native American background for such acclaimed novels as “The Round House” and “The Plague of Doves.” In “The Night Watchman,” she looks back to her grandfather, a night watchman whose reservation in rural North Dakota is threatened in the 1950s by congressional legislation. Previous honors for Erdrich, who turned 67 this week, include a National Book Award for “The Round House” and the National Book Critics Circle award for “LaRose.”
Marcia Chatelain’s “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” won for history. Natalie Diaz’s “Postcolonial Love Poem” was the poetry winner and David Zucchino’s “Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy” was cited for general nonfiction.
Tania León's composition “Stride” won for music. The judges commended for being “a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the U.S. and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric.”
“The Hot Wing King” by Katori Hall, a play set around a hot wing cooking competition, won the prize for drama during a theater season that saw most venues largely shuttered.
The drama award, which includes a $15,000 prize, is “for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.”
The Pulitzer board hailed “The Hot Wing King” as a “funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.”
Finalists included “Circle Jerk” by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley,” and “Stew” by Zora Howard.
With most theaters closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer Prize Board altered the requirements for this year’s drama award, allowing postponed or cancelled works, as well as plays produced and performed in places other than theaters, including online, outside or in site-specific venues during calendar 2020. “The Hot Wing King” opened off-Broadway just days before the city’s theaters were closed.
Hall is the author of the Olivier Award-winning “The Mountaintop” and is a Tony Award-nominated co- playwright of Broadway’s “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.”
Previous playwrights honored include August Wilson, Edward Albee, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Recent winners include Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” Ayad Akhtar’s “Disgraced,” Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “Between Riverside and Crazy,” and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.”
