What are the Pulitzer prizes?

Two Indian-origin journalists were among the winners of the Pulitzer Prize announced on June 11. While Megha Ragapalan bagged the award for her investigative reporting in China's mass detention camps, Neil Bedi won for local reporting along with Kathleen McGrory. Here are some Indians and people of Indian origin who have won the prize in the past:

Photojournalism

In 2018, Adnan Abidi and Danish Siddiqui became the first Indians to win a Pulitzer for feature photography. The two photojournalists at Reuters were given the award for documenting the Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

In March 2020, Dar Yasin, Mukhtar Khan, and Channi Anand were bestowed the honour for capturing life in Kashmir after the scrapping of Article 370 and the communication clampdown.

Reporting

Gobind Behari Lal was the first Indian to win the Pulitzer in 1937. Along with four others, he won in the reporting category for his coverage of science. One of the earliest science writers, Gobind Lal had interviewed Albert Einstein, among others. In 2003, Geeta Anand, of Indian origin bagged the award was part of a team at the Wall Street Journal for a series on the impact of corporate scandals in the U.S. Another Indian origin journalist Sanghamitra Kalita, former managing editor of Los Angeles Times won in 2015.

Literature

Author Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" won in the fiction category in 2000.

In 2011, Indian-American cancer physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee was awarded the general nonfiction prize for his book - "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer". Poet Vijay Seshadri won for his collection of poems '3 Sections, which examined human consciousness from birth to dementia.

What are the Pulitzer prizes?

Named after the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize awards newspaper, magazine and online journalism, photo journalism and literature annually. Pulitzer allocated money in his will to be donated to Columbia University for the purposes of opening a journalism school and establishing the prize. And so, the award is administered by Columbia University.

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