(UTV | US) – US author Colson Whitehead has become only the fourth writer ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice.
The African-American author was honoured for The Nickel Boys, which chronicles the abuse of black boys at a juvenile reform school in Florida.
Whitehead, a 50-year-old New Yorker, won the 2017 prize in the same category for his book The Underground Railroad.
Before him, only Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike had won the Pulitzer for fiction twice.
The 2020 awards, postponed for several weeks due to the coronavirus, were announced remotely this year in the living room of Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy.
She noted that the first Pulitzers were awarded in 1917, less than a year before the outbreak of the Spanish Flu.
They are among the highest honours for US-based journalists and authors.
Whitehead has previously said he grew up wanting to be the black version of horror writer Stephen King.
His Nickel Boys was inspired by the real-life horror story of the Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle, where children convicted of minor offences were subjected to violent abuse.
The Harvard graduate’s novel was praised by the Pulitzer committee for its “spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption”.
The New York Times newspaper topped the list of publications for journalism honours with three awards, including the prestigious investigative reporting prize for Brian Rosenthal’s expose of New York City’s taxi industry, showing how predatory lenders exploited vulnerable drivers.