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New York - Jennifer Egan's inventive novel about the passage of time, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday, honoured for its "big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed".
Egan, 48, has been highly praised for her searching and unconventional narratives about modern angst and identity. Her other novels include The Invisible Circus, Look at Me and The Keep.
Critics were especially taken with A Visit From the Goon Squad, with its leaps across time and its experiments with format, notably a long section structured like a PowerPoint presentation. Earlier this year, she won the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Drama prize
"The book is so much about how change is unexpected and always kind of shocking," she said by phone. Egan said she was inspired by Marcel Proust's sprawling novel Remembrance of Things Past, which explored the passage of time.
"His book of time is all about how the work of time is unpredictable and in some sense unfathomable," she said. "So there's no question that winning a prize like this feel unpredictable and unfathomable."
The play Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, which examines race relations and the effects of modern gentrification, won the drama prize. The work imagines what might have happened to the family that moved out of the house in the fictitious Chicago neighbourhood of Clybourne Park, which is where Lorraine Hansberry's Younger clan is headed by the end of her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.
"I'm deeply honoured and totally flabbergasted to receive this recognition," said Norris, who was staying on an island off the coast of Maine when he learned of the win. He thanked the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago for 10 years of support.
Other prizes
The Pulitzer for history was awarded to The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner. It was cited as "a well orchestrated examination of Lincoln's changing views of slavery, bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story."
Ron Chernow, a New York-based historian who has written about Alexander Hamilton and John D Rockefeller in the past, won the Pulitzer for biography for Washington: A Life, about the nation's first president. It's his first Pulitzer Prize.
Kay Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems won the poetry prize, a book called by the Pulitzer board "a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind". Ryan was US Poet Laureate from 2008-2010.
The general nonfiction prize was given to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia.
The music prize went to Zhou Long for Madame White Snake, which was hailed as "a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West".
Other finalists
The Pulitzers in journalism, letters, drama and music are given out annually by Columbia University on the recommendation of a 19-person board and each award carries a $10 000 prize.
Finalists in the fiction category included The Privileges by Jonathan Dee and The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee. Jonathan Franzen, whose novel Freedom was the most talked about literary novel of 2010, did not make the list.
Finalists for the drama prize included the Broadway-bound play Detroit by Lisa D'Amour and the sprawling A Free Man of Color by John Guare, which was produced at Lincoln Centre.
Egan, 48, has been highly praised for her searching and unconventional narratives about modern angst and identity. Her other novels include The Invisible Circus, Look at Me and The Keep.
Critics were especially taken with A Visit From the Goon Squad, with its leaps across time and its experiments with format, notably a long section structured like a PowerPoint presentation. Earlier this year, she won the National Book Critics Circle prize.
Drama prize
"The book is so much about how change is unexpected and always kind of shocking," she said by phone. Egan said she was inspired by Marcel Proust's sprawling novel Remembrance of Things Past, which explored the passage of time.
"His book of time is all about how the work of time is unpredictable and in some sense unfathomable," she said. "So there's no question that winning a prize like this feel unpredictable and unfathomable."
The play Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris, which examines race relations and the effects of modern gentrification, won the drama prize. The work imagines what might have happened to the family that moved out of the house in the fictitious Chicago neighbourhood of Clybourne Park, which is where Lorraine Hansberry's Younger clan is headed by the end of her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.
"I'm deeply honoured and totally flabbergasted to receive this recognition," said Norris, who was staying on an island off the coast of Maine when he learned of the win. He thanked the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago for 10 years of support.
Other prizes
The Pulitzer for history was awarded to The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner. It was cited as "a well orchestrated examination of Lincoln's changing views of slavery, bringing unforeseeable twists and a fresh sense of improbability to a familiar story."
Ron Chernow, a New York-based historian who has written about Alexander Hamilton and John D Rockefeller in the past, won the Pulitzer for biography for Washington: A Life, about the nation's first president. It's his first Pulitzer Prize.
Kay Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems won the poetry prize, a book called by the Pulitzer board "a treasure trove of an iconoclastic and joyful mind". Ryan was US Poet Laureate from 2008-2010.
The general nonfiction prize was given to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an oncologist and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia.
The music prize went to Zhou Long for Madame White Snake, which was hailed as "a deeply expressive opera that draws on a Chinese folk tale to blend the musical traditions of the East and the West".
Other finalists
The Pulitzers in journalism, letters, drama and music are given out annually by Columbia University on the recommendation of a 19-person board and each award carries a $10 000 prize.
Finalists in the fiction category included The Privileges by Jonathan Dee and The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee. Jonathan Franzen, whose novel Freedom was the most talked about literary novel of 2010, did not make the list.
Finalists for the drama prize included the Broadway-bound play Detroit by Lisa D'Amour and the sprawling A Free Man of Color by John Guare, which was produced at Lincoln Centre.
