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The 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Primary Trust, by Eboni Booth

A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community.

Eboni Booth accepts the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama from Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

Primary Trust

By

Eboni Booth

Production trailer. (Roundabout Theatre Company)

“NYC'S BEST NEW PLAY. BOOK A TICKET RIGHT NOW.”

TIM TEEMAN, DAILY BEAST

“RESTORES YOUR FAITH IN THEATRE'S STORYTELLING POWERS WITH THE DREAMIEST OF DREAM CASTS.”

DAVID COTE, OBSERVER

Do you have the courage to change? In Eboni Booth’s absorbing, funny, and ultimately stunning new play—the New York Times Critic’s Pick and “pretty darn near to a perfect play” (Tim Teeman, Daily Beast)—William Jackson Harper (The Good Place) heads a remarkable company, directed by Knud Adams, as Kenneth, a 38-year-old bookstore worker facing a world he’s long avoided. The Observer says, “it will restore your faith in theatre’s elemental storytelling powers.”

-- from the Roundabout Theatre Company production page

Biography

Eboni Booth is a writer and actor from New York City. Her plays include Primary Trust (Roundabout Theatre) and Paris (Atlantic Theater). For television, she has written for Hulu’s We Were the Lucky Ones and HBO Max’s Julia. As an actor, Eboni has appeared in productions at Playwrights Horizons, LCT3, Manhattan Theater Club, Ars Nova, WP Theater, Page 73, Soho Rep., Clubbed Thumb, and more. Eboni is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and the recipient of a Steinberg Playwright Award, a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and a John Gassner award. She is a graduate of Juilliard’s playwriting program and the University of Vermont. 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2024:

Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich

An elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater that examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz and probes the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury

A densely written, deeply-felt drama that examines identity, home, queerness, and language through the lens of a Bengali American reuniting with his family in India.

The Jury

Janice Simpson(Chair)

Former Director, Arts Journalism Program, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

Lisa Fung

Writer, Los Angeles & New York City

Lily Janiak

Theater Critic, San Francisco Chronicle

Tracy Letts*

Playwright, Bedford, N.Y.

Chay Yew

Stage Director/Playwright, New York City

Winners in Drama

2023

Sanaz Toossi

A quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran, where family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life.
2022

James Ijames

A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes "Hamlet" to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.
2021

Katori Hall

A funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.
2020

Michael R. Jackson

A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.
See All Drama

2024 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of Reuters

For an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.
See All 2024 Winners