Culture - Novel set in occupied France wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

American author Anthony Doerr was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on Monday for his novel “All the Light We Cannot See”, which is set in German-occupied France during World War II. Doerr happened to be in Paris, where part of the book is set, when he learned about the award.

 “I’m here, to find this out – it’s crazy,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
The Pulitzer jury praised Doerr’s book as “an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology”.

In “All the Light We Cannot See”, Doerr beautifully intertwines the stories of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young, blind French girl, and Werner Pfenning, a gifted orphan who is conscripted into the German army during World War II.

Read more: Culture - Novel set in occupied France wins Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - France 24

Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for NSA spying revelations; by Paul Farhi

A team of 28 Post journalists, led by reporter Barton Gellman, won the public service award, as did Guardian US, which also reported extensively about the NSA’s secret programs. Gellman and Glenn Greenwald, then the Guardian’s lead reporter on the NSA pieces, based their articles on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who has fled to exile in Russia, lending a controversial edge to this year’s awards.

The Post’s Eli Saslow also won a Pulitzer — newspaper journalism’s highest award — for a series of stories about the challenges of people living on food stamps. Saslow, 31, was cited in the explanatory-journalism category by the 19-member Pulitzer board in an announcement at Columbia University in New York, which administers the prizes.

The Boston Globe won in the breaking-news category for its extensive coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings last April.

The New York Times swept the two photography categories. The award in breaking photography went to Tyler Hicks for his photos of a terrorist attack on a shopping mall in Nairobi, and the feature-photography prize went to Josh Haner for his photos of a Boston Marathon bombing victim who lost most of both legs.

Read more: Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for NSA spying revelations; Guardian also honored - The Washington Post