The Pulitzer Prize board today announced the 2015 winners and finalists in 21 categories in journalism and the arts.
Zachary R. Mider ’01 received the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, for his series “Tax Runaways,” about corporate tax avoidance. His award was also a first for Bloomberg News, where he has been a reporter since 2006.
Six other University affiliates were among the nominated finalists.
Gary Marx ’80 and David Jackson, a Nieman Fellow in 2009, together with Duaa Eldeib, were recognized for their Chicago Tribune exposé on Illinois residential treatment centers for wards of the state. Jackson and Marx were previously Pulitzer finalists for their 2011 series, “Fugitives from Justice.” Each has been a finalist on two other occasions: Jackson in 1995 and 1999, and Marx in 1987 and 2012.
Kevin P. Kallaugher ’77 was named a finalist in the category of editorial cartooning for his work for The Baltimore Sun. (Read more about him in this magazine’s 2007 story, “Where the Eyeballs Are.”) Earlier this spring, Kallaugher received the 2015 Herblock Prize for his work in both the Sun and The Economist.
Two Harvardians were recognized for works of book-length nonfiction. Bell professor of history Sven Beckert was a finalist in history for Empire of Cotton: A Global History, which also won a 2015 Bancroft Prize in History. (Beckert’s work was featured last fall in this magazine’s “The New Histories.”) New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos ’98 was a finalist in general nonfiction for Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. (Reviewed in this magazine last summer, it won the 2014 National Book Award in nonfiction. Osnos also participated in the magazine’s roundtable feature article “Changing, Challenging China.”)
In music, Lei Liang, Ph.D. ’06, was a finalist in music for Xiaoxiang, a concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra. Inspired by the story of a widow who mourns for a husband killed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it premiered at the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall in March 2014. Liang was a 1998 member of the Harvard Society of Fellows; the University awarded him its 2006 George Arthur Knight Prize for his string quartet, Serashi Fragments.
