Bess Wohl’s Liberation Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

One day before Tony nominations are to be announced, voters got a reminder about just how good the since-closed Liberation is. Bess Wohl’s play, which both of our critics listed as the best theater of 2025, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama today. Its fellow finalists were two Off Broadway darlings: Talene Monahon’s Armenian American epic Meet the Cartozians and Nazareth Hassan’s musical skateboard play Bowl EP. In its explanation, the Pulitzers called Liberation a “striking blend of comedy and sincerity that explores the legacy of the consciousness-raising feminist groups of the 1970s, using the story of the playwright’s mother to demonstrate how the movement grew out of conversation, and that anyone experiencing the play has joined the discussion.” Next stop: Tony nominations.

Daniel Kraus’s one-sentence novel Angel Down won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, beating out Torrey Peters’s short-story collection Stag Dance and Katie Kitamura’s dual narrative Audition. “It’s a hypervivid depiction of war, shorn of any glory — a prose wall of taste, touch, smell, and the worst sights in the world,” Vulture said about Angel Down on our “Best Horror Books of 2025” list. “And it’s all told in one single, winding 300-page sentence. Don’t be put off by the experimentation, though; Kraus’s writing traps the eye just as it repels the senses. Angel Down is very readable and very distressing.” The other winning books were Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution in History; Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution in Biography; Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow in Memoir/Autobiography; Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas in Poetry; and Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America in General Nonfiction.

In other notable categories, M. Gessen won for Opinion Writing, the Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster won for Criticism, and the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out won for Audio Reporting. The full list of winners and shortlisted candidates can be found here.