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The 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Criticism
For distinguished criticism, using any available journalistic tool, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post

For trenchant and searching reviews and essays that joined warm emotion and careful analysis in examining a broad range of books addressing government and the American experience.

Carlos Lozada accepts the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. (Eileen Barroso/Columbia University)

Winning Work

Biography

Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of the Washington Post and has previously served as the Post’s Sunday Outlook editor, national security editor and economics editor. He received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian citation for excellence in reviewing in 2016 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018.

Before joining the Post in 2005, Lozada was the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University’s Journalism School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University. For the past decade, he has taught an undergraduate course in political journalism for Notre Dame’s Washington program. Born in Lima, Peru, Lozada immigrated to the United States as a child and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2019:

Jill Lepore of The New Yorker

For critical, yet restrained, explorations of incredibly varied subjects, from Frankenstein to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that combined literary nuance with intellectual rigor.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times

For authoritative film criticism that considered the impact of movies both inside the theater and in the wider world with rare passion, craftsmanship and insight.

The Jury

Mark Feeney(Chair)*

Arts Writer

Lauren Gustus

Editor, The Sacramento Bee; West Regional Editor, McClatchy

Lydia Polgreen

Editor-in-Chief

Alisa Solomon

Professor of Journalism; Director, Arts Concentration, MA Journalism Program

Joe Stephens

Director, Program in Journalism; Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence

Winners in Criticism

2018

Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine

For a robust body of work that conveyed a canny and often daring perspective on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane.
2017

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
2016

Emily Nussbaum

For television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.
2015

Mary McNamara

For savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.
See All Criticism

2019 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

Hannah Dreier of ProPublica

For a series of powerful, intimate narratives that followed Salvadoran immigrants on New York’s Long Island whose lives were shattered by a botched federal crackdown on the international criminal gang MS-13.
See All 2019 Winners