Here Are This Year's Pulitzer Winners

This year's Pulitzers reflected a year dominated by COVID-19 and furious debate over race and policing. Highlights, via the AP:

• Breaking news: The Star Tribune of Minneapolis won the breaking news prize for its coverage of George Floyd's murder and its aftermath, while Darnella Frazier—the teenager who recorded the killing on a cellphone—received a special citation. (Read details on that.)
• Public service: The New York Times receive its public service prize for pandemic coverage that the judges said was “courageous, prescient and sweeping coverage” and “filled the data vacuum” for the public.
• Criticism: Wesley Morris of the Times won for criticism, for his writing on the intersection of race and culture.
• Arts: Stories of race, racism, and colonialism in the US swept the Pulitzer Prizes for the arts, from Louise Erdrich's novel The Night Watchman to a Malcolm X biography co-written by the late Les Payne (The Dead Are Arising), to Katori Hall's play The Hot Wing King. More on the arts prizes here.

• Investigative reporting: The Boston Globe received the investigative reporting Pulitzer for a series demonstrating the systematic failure by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers.
• Explanatory reporting: Prizes for explanatory reporting went to two recipients. Ed Yong of The Atlantic won for a series of deeply reported articles about the pandemic. Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Andrea Januta, Jaimi Dowdell, and Jackie Botts of Reuters were honored for a look at the legal concept of qualified immunity and how it shields police from prosecution.
• Feature writing: Two prizes for feature writing were also awarded. Nadja Drost won for her freelance piece in the California Sunday Magazine on global migration, and freelance contributor Mitchell S. Jackson for an account in Runner's World on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was chased down and shot while jogging in Georgia.
• National reporting: The national reporting prize went to the staffs of The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar, and the Invisible Institute for an investigation into police K-9 units.
• Feature photography: The feature photography prize went to AP’s chief photographer in Spain, Emilio Morenatti, who captured haunting images of an older couple embracing through a plastic sheet, mortuary workers in hazmat gear removing bodies, and people enduring the crisis in isolation.
• Breaking-news photography: The breaking-news photography prize was shared by 10 AP photographers for their coverage of the protests set off by Floyd's killing. One widely published photograph by Julio Cortez on the night of May 28 in riot-torn Minneapolis showed a lone, silhouetted protester running with an upside-down American flag past a burning liquor store.

(More Pulitzer Prize stories.)