Daniel Kraus’ 'Angel Down' and Bess Wohl's 'Liberation' are among Pulitzer winners in the arts

Audio By Carbonatix

NEW YORK (AP) — Pulitzer Prize officials awarded the fiction prize to an author with a history of experimenting with genres and with language itself: Daniel Kraus, cited for “Angel Down,” a World War I narrative with a celestial twist that unfolds over some 300 pages in one long sentence. “Liberation,” Bess Wohl's look back at the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s received the drama prize.

Winners announced Monday included two books rooted in the country's founding. Jill Lepore's “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” won for history, and Amanda Vaill's “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution” was the winner for biography. Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” her blunt account of the suicides of her two sons, was cited for memoir-autobiography. Brian Goldstone's “There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” won for general nonfiction.

The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr's “Ars Poeticas,” and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for “Picaflor: A Future Myth,” a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.

The 50-year-old Kraus has had a diverse and prolific career quite unlike the average Pulitzer fiction winner. He has written horror, science fiction, graphic novels and books for kids. He has collaborated with filmmakers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro, whose Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water” was conceived with Kraus' help. He has received numerous prizes over the years, including the Bram Stoker Award for horror, but had never imagined he'd win a Pulitzer. When he began receiving texts Monday — that included such messages as “Wow!” — he worried that he had somehow gotten himself in trouble.

Pulitzer officials 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.” Kraus says that he at first used a conventional narrative but found that abandoning traditional punctuation better suited a story of war that seemingly had no end.

“It's like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” he told The Associated Press during a telephone interview.

Wohl’s memory play collects second-wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles. The play navigates between past and present, and six of the actors disrobe for the Act 2 opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony Award nominations, when “Liberation” is expected to be named in the best new play category.

Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard University professor whose Pulitzer helps confirm her as one of the country's most prominent historians, her previous honors including the Bancroft Prize for “The Name of War” and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “New York Burning.” In 2023, she contributed an introduction to Paul McCartney's book of Beatles photos, “1964: Eyes of the Storm.”

____

Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed.