Living Canon

Pulitzer Prizes 2003: Complete list of winners

The 2003 Pulitzer Prizes celebrated storytelling in all its forms, from monumental historical works to dazzling debuts that announced major new literary talents. Robert A. Caro’s Master of the Senate claimed the Biography prize, continuing his legendary multi-volume examination of Lyndon B. Johnson’s political rise with characteristic depth and narrative power. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Eugenides made a splash with Middlesex, his inventive multi-generational saga that earned the Fiction award and introduced readers to one of the decade’s most distinctive new voices. The year’s winners showcased the Pulitzer committee’s appetite for ambitious scope—whether Samantha Power’s urgent examination of American inaction in “A Problem From Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide, Rick Atkinson’s gripping military history An Army at Dawn, or Paul Muldoon’s intricate poetry collection Moy Sand and Gravel.

Drama too saw a landmark moment when Nilo Cruz became the first Cuban-born playwright to win the prize for his play Anna in the Tropics, a work that brought questions of desire, displacement, and cultural identity to the American stage with fresh urgency. The 2003 Pulitzer Prizes reflected an award body increasingly willing to honor boundary-crossing work—fiction that played with form, biography that read like gripping narrative, and voices speaking to contemporary moral crises. These winners would go on to shape literary conversations for years to come.

Biography

Drama

Fiction

General Nonfiction

History

Poetry