The 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to a single unspooling line of prose that begins at the first word of Chicago-based writer and screenwriter Daniel Kraus’ novel Angel Down and continues around 300 pages down till the last word of the novel.
In a writing style obliquely reminiscent of the Hungarian Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai, Kraus does not use full stops anywhere in the novel, the narrative marches ahead much like the forward grind of soldiers crossing No Man’s Land toward a rumored German stronghold, where instead of finding an enemy battalion, they find a fallen angel tangled in the wire. This breathless, claustrophobic rush is the syntactic equivalent of a trench barrage.
“It’s like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” Kraus told the Associated Press in a telephone interview. He arrived on this narrative after trying the conventional way, full stops and all, but came to the conclusion that a novel about war with no end in sight should be written in an unending form as well.
Kraus, who is 50, has dipped his toes in a variety of genres—horror, science fiction, graphic novels, children’s books, you name it. But, what he is, arguably, best known for is his collaborations with filmmakers Guillermo del Toro for The Shape of Water that won the Oscar for best picture in 2018, and an unfinished novel by George A Romero after the director’s death in 2017.
Kraus has received numerous prizes over the years, including the Bram Stoker Award for horror, but he never imagined that he would one day win the Pulitzer Prize. He was perplexed when he started receiving a barrage of messages after his win, he told the Associated Press, and was momentarily worried that he had somehow gotten himself in trouble. Instead, it was just congratulations and adulations for writing a novel that The Pulitzer board praised Angel Down as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence.”
A memory play
Bess Wohl’s Liberation is a memory play. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The Pulitzer for drama went to Bess Wohl’s “Liberation,” a memory play that looks back at the feminist consciousness‑raising groups of the 1970s. The work brings together second‑wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalised homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles, all the while weaving between the past and present.
Coincidentally, the Pulitzer win arrived only one day before the Tony Award nominations, where the play got another nod, making it a row of wins for Bess Wohl.
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Founding era and a devastating memoir
The Pulitzer for history went to New Yorker staff writer and Harvard University professor Jill Lepore for We the People: A History of the US Constitution (Liveright). Lepore, is already one of America’s most prominent historians and her previous honours include the Bancroft Prize for The Name of War and the Anisfield‑Wolf Book Award for New York Burning. In 2023, she also contributed an introduction to Paul McCartney’s book of Beatles photos, 1964: Eyes of the Storm.
The biography prize was awarded to Amanda Vaill for “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which frees Angelica Schuyler Church and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton from Alexander Hamilton’s footnotes.
In the memoir‑autobiography category, Yiyun Li won for “Things in Nature Merely Grow” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) that was described by the AP as a “blunt account of the suicides of her two sons.”
Homelessness, poetry and wildfires
The general nonfiction prize went to the journalist Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (Crown) who spent years with families who had to sleep in shelters despite having jobs. The finalists included Haley Cohen Gilliland who wrote about Argentine grandmothers who fought to find children stolen during the dictatorship, and Kevin Sack’s work on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston after the 2015 killings/
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Ars Poeticas author Juliana Spahr won the poetry prize, while the music award went to Gabriela Lena Frank for “Picaflor: A Future Myth” (G. Schirmer, Inc.), a symphonic work inspired by the Andean legend and the California wildfires.
Bess Wohl’s Liberation is a memory play. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)