New York: India-born poet Vijay Seshadri has won the prestigious 2014 Pulitzer Prize in the poetry category for his witty and philosophical collection of poems while The Washington Post and Guardian were awarded for their reports on America's secret global surveillance programmes. Seshadri won the Pulitzer, considered the most prestigious awards in journalism, for his work '3 Sections' which is a "compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless."
The 98th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music, awarded on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board, were announced on Monday by Columbia University. A Columbia University alum, Seshadri, 60, would receive a USD 10,000 prize. Born in Bangalore in 1954, Seshadri came to America at the age of five and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. He became the fifth person of Indian-origin to bag the prestigious prize. The Post and US edition of the Guardian newspaper won the prestigious public service medal, which is for a "distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalistic resources, including the use of stories, editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or other visual material, a gold medal."
The Post won for its "revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security." The Guardian was awarded for its "revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy."
The Boston Globe staff received the Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News Reporting category for its "exhaustive and empathetic" coverage of the Marathon bombings last year. The 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to 'The Goldfinch' by American writer Donna Tartt for her "coming-of- age" novel about a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting that has eluded destruction. The award in the drama category went to 'The Flick' by Annie Baker that focuses on three employees of a Massachusetts art-house movie theatre. The New York Times won two awards in the Breaking News Photography category for Tyler Hicks' "compelling" pictures documenting the unfolding terrorist attack at Westgate mall in Kenya. The Feature Photography category award went to Josh Haner of The New York Times for his "moving essay" on a Boston Marathon bomb blast victim who lost most of both legs and now is painfully rebuilding his life.
