NEW YORK (AP) — Joshua Cohen’s “The Netanyahu,” a comical and rigorous campus novel based on the true story of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father who seeks a job in academia, has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction won.
Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012, was a medieval historian and ultranationalist who taught at several American schools, including the University of Denver and Cornell University. Set around 1959-60, The Netanyahus focuses on a Jewish historian at a university loosely based on Cornell, who is asked to help decide whether to hire the visiting Israeli scholar. The novel, subtitled “An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” was highly acclaimed for its mixture of wit and intellectual debate on Zionism and Jewish identity.
“It’s exasperating, frustrating, pretentious work — and also engaging, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking, and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever,” wrote Taffy Brodesser-Akner of The New York Times last June.
Many of Art Monday’s winners have been exploring race and class, past and present. Winners were also announced in several journalism categories.
James Ijames’ “Fat Ham,” an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” set at a black family’s barbecue in the modern South, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Raven Chacon, the first native composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, was honored in the music category for “Voiceless Mass.”
The late artist Winfred Rembert won in the biography for Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South, as told by Erin I. Kelly. Rembert, who survived several years in prison and a near-lynching in rural Georgia in the 1960s, died last year at the age of 75.
In an interview Monday, Kelly opened up about the book’s long and unexpected backstory. She is a professor of philosophy at Tufts University and came across his work a few years ago while working on another project on criminal justice. She contacted Rembert, who lived in New Haven, Connecticut, and found him so compelling that she wanted to make sure his life was properly documented.
“He was both charismatic and down to earth,” she said. “He had an incredible understanding of language and an incredible visual memory.”
Rembert was in poor health and died before Chasing Me to My Grave was published, although he did see an edited manuscript.
“We both felt a great sense of urgency to finish the book,” Kelly said.
Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, which builds on her New York Times investigative series about a homeless black girl from Brooklyn, received a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Elliott’s book has previously won the Gotham Prize for outstanding work on New York City.
Two history awards were presented on Monday: Nicole Eustace’s “Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America” and Ada Ferrer’s “Cuba: An American History,” which traces the centuries-old relationship between the U.S. and its southern neighbor .
Diane Seuss won in poetry for “frank: sonettes. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, her collection draws in part from her rural Michigan roots and features her fierce and lyrical reflections on gender, class, and substance abuse, among other things.
“My father died very young. My mother raised my sister and me. My young self came to poetry purely by instinct,” Seuss said Monday, also citing influences from Frank O’Hara to Amy Winehouse. “I see ‘frank: sonets’ as a community effort – with the living and the dead.”
Chacon created “Voiceless Mass” specifically for the pipe organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, where it premiered in November 2021. Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from the Navajo Nation. His artwork, currently on display at the Whitney Biennial, is inspired by protesters at the Oceti Sakowin near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
“This was my first time writing for a church organ, and I wanted to make a statement about the space that houses that organ,” said Chacon, who is Diné, the Navajo word for “the people.” “I wanted to think about the role of the church in shaping the country, especially in relation to the indigenous people.”
His 2020 opera, co-written with Du Yun, Sweet Land was performed outdoors at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and was critically acclaimed for its revisionist portrayal of American history while using multiple narratives simultaneously. The opera was awarded Best Opera for 2021 by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, Chacon has mentored hundreds of Native American high school composers in writing string quartets as part of the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project.
Chacon told The Associated Press in an interview after learning of the Pulitzer victory that he wants his work to stand as a reminder of indigenous peoples’ involvement in chamber and classical music.
“I am pleased that this work has been heard. I think chamber music as a whole is not something that can always be accessible to a wide audience,” said Chacon. “Everyone has the opportunity to hear chamber music and I am happy to be able to contribute.”
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez congratulated Chacon, saying the artist embodies the tremendous potential of the Navajo people.
“His award showcases Aboriginal talent, innovation and creativity and shows our young people that through hard work and prayer, anything is possible,” Nez said in a statement to the AP.
Chacon graduated from the University of New Mexico and the California Institute of the Arts and is expected to begin a residency at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage in Philadelphia in 2022.
His solo artwork has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Institute’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, among many others.
Drama finalists included Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul” and Kristina Wong’s “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord.”
The Drama Award, which is endowed with $15,000, is “awarded for an outstanding play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.” Ijames is a Philadelphia-based playwright and Associate Artistic Director of the Wilma Theater, whose production of Fat Ham streamed last summer.
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AP Entertainment writers Kristin M. Hall and Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.