The winners of the 2020 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, recognizing excellence in journalism, letters, music, and drama, and The New Yorker’s Ben Taub and Barry Blitt were among the honorees.
Taub won in the feature-writing category for a devastating account of a man who was kidnapped, tortured, and deprived of his liberty for more than a decade at Guantánamo Bay. Despite this litany of horrors, Mohamedou Salahi survived with his spirit intact and gained a new friend, a former Guantánamo guard with whom he reconnected after he was released. In its citation, the Pulitzer Board praised Taub for “blending on-the-ground reporting and lyrical prose to offer a nuanced perspective on America’s wider war on terror.”
Blitt won in the editorial-cartooning category for work that included several magazine covers and an array of cartoons published exclusively online. For nearly three decades in the pages of The New Yorker and, more recently, in a regular series on the magazine’s Web site, Blitt’s political cartoons have parodied, delighted, and informed. The Pulitzer judges recognized Blitt “for work that skewers the personalities and policies emanating from the Trump White House with deceptively sweet watercolor style and seemingly gentle caricatures.”
Taub joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2017. He has written for the magazine about a range of subjects related to jihadism, crime, conflict, and human rights, mostly in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Since 1992, Blitt has contributed illustrations and more than a hundred covers to The New Yorker.
In addition, this year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction, “The Nickel Boys,” by Colson Whitehead, was excerpted in the magazine in March, 2019. And Anne Boyer’s “The Undying,” a winner in the nonfiction category, was excerpted in April, 2019.
Read Taub’s prize-winning piece, and view some of Blitt’s prize-winning work below.
