Hisham Matar and Matthew Desmond win 2017 Pulitzer Prizes

Penguin Random House UK authors Hisham Matar and Matthew Desmond were both awarded Pulitzer Prizes last night, as announced at a ceremony at Columbia University in New York.

Published by Penguin General, The Return won the Biography or Autobiography Prize. The book sees novelist Hisham Matar return to Libya following the fall of the Gaddafi regime, 22 years after leaving due to the kidnapping and arrest of his father. It has also been shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and the Rathbones Folio Prize earlier this year.

Penguin Press author Matthew Desmond was awarded the General Nonfiction Prize for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which sees Desmond explore the mass evictions which followed the 2008 economic crash. The book has already seen critical success, winning the 2017 PEN America Nonfiction Award in February.

Elsewhere, Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, also published by Penguin General, was a finalist in the Fiction Prize, and bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalinithi, published by VINTAGE, was a finalist for the Biography or Autobiography Prize.

The awards, seen as the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the United States, were first launched one hundred years ago in 1917, and see each winner receive $15,000. 

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