The 2026 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, with major honours in music and drama highlighting works that grapple with history, identity and the fragility of contemporary life.

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Picaflor: A Future Myth, a large-scale symphonic work inspired by Andean mythology and the ecological trauma of wildfires. The piece follows a hummingbird navigating catastrophe, blending personal narrative with environmental themes in what the Pulitzer Board described as a strikingly imaginative score.

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank. Photo © Mariah Tauger

In drama, playwright Bess Wohl has won for Liberation, a play examining feminist consciousness-raising movements in 1970s America through a contemporary lens. Premiered off-Broadway before transferring to Broadway, the work interweaves humour and critique as it revisits the ideals and contradictions of second-wave feminism.

Across the arts and letters categories, the prizes recognised a wide range of literary achievement. Daniel Kraus won the fiction award for Angel Down, an experimental World War I novel written as a single extended sentence. Other winners included historian Jill Lepore, biographer Amanda Vaill, memoirist Yiyun Li, poet Juliana Spahr and nonfiction writer Brian Goldstone.

In journalism, the awards again underscored the strength of investigative and public-interest reporting, with major honours going to outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times and Reuters for work spanning government accountability, global conflict and social issues.

Administered by Columbia University, the Pulitzers remain among the most prestigious awards in journalism and the arts, recognising distinguished American work across 23 categories each year.