Prestige Prize

Journalists who win Pulitzer Prizes often address large issues, but the most remarkable Pulitzer winner this year treated a keenly personal subject. George Lardner of the Washington Post won the feature-writing award for his article on the murder of a promising young woman. The woman was Lardner's daughter.

Other winners included Roy Gutman of Newsday and John Burns of the New York Times, who shared an international reporting prize for their dispatches from Bosnia. Burns was not on the list of finalists, and there were allegations that the Times applied last-minute pressure to the Pulitzer jury. David McCullough won the biography prize for Truman, the book that triggered the "I'm Truman . . . No, I'm Truman" cross talk during last year's presidential campaign. A surprise came with an award to Robert Olen Butler for his short-story collection seen through the eyes of exiled Vietnamese, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. And playwright Tony Kushner was cited for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, his epic about aids and the American soul. Kushner released a statement that read in part: "FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABULOUS!"