Author Geraldine Brooks.
Photo: Neil Newitt
Australian author and journalist Geraldine Brooks has taken a minor character in a major American novel and transformed his story into the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
March, Brooks's invention of the Civil War adventures of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women, was awarded the honour.
No Pulitzer was awarded for drama, the first time since 1997.
In her novel, Brooks, an Australian with dual US citizenship, takes the character of March, a Union military chaplain, through the war while his wife and four daughters remain at home in Massachusetts.
Brooks, reached in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, said she was "in a state of disbelief, really. I just can't believe it. It's like being struck by lightning".
"I have no big plans. I think I might have to make some, and they might have to involve some champagne," said Brooks, whose husband, Tony Horwitz, won a Pulitzer in 1995 for national reporting with The Wall Street Journal .
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin was cited for biography.
"Oppenheimer was well known for black hole theory," said Bird.
"He as a subject was a black hole - extremely enigmatic, complicated."
The book about the father of the atomic bomb occupied Sherwin for 25 years.
"It was a great project for many of those years and for some of those years, a great burden," he said.
"Marty got biography disease - he ended up with over 50,000 pages of archival research. He was drowning in paper at one point," said Bird.
The prize for poetry went to Claudia Emerson for Late Wife , poems based on a series of letters to her ex-husband.
Emerson, a professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, said she was thrilled and surprised about the award.
"It's about recovery and convalescence," she said. "It means a lot to me, because the book is intensely personal."
David M Oshinsky, a professor of American history at the University of Texas, Austin, was awarded the history prize for Polio: An American Story.
"I grew up in fear of this disease. I remember the iron lung and the wheelchairs and not being able to go to swimming pools," the author said in talking about a subject he said always interested him.
The prize for general non-fiction went to Caroline Elkins for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.
The Pulitzer board had listed three finalists for drama: Red Light Winter , Adam Rapp's play about two good friends and their relationships with a young prostitute they pick up in Amsterdam; Miss Witherspoon, Christopher Durang's surreal fantasy about a perpetually suicidal woman who keeps coming back from the dead; and The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, Rolin Jones's comedy about a bright, yet eccentric, young woman who builds a humanlike robot.
Yet Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said there was no clear-cut drama winner among the scores of entries.
The 2006 Pulitzer Prize winners:
JOURNALISM:
Public service - Two prizes: The Sun Herald of Biloxi, Mississippi, and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
Breaking news reporting - Staff of The Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
Investigative reporting - Susan Schmidt, James V Grimaldi and R Jeffrey Smith of The Washington Post.
Explanatory reporting - David Finkel of The Washington Post.
Beat reporting - Dana Priest of The Washington Post.
National reporting - Two Prizes: James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times and the staffs of The San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service.
International reporting - Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley of The New York Times.
Feature writing - Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado.
Commentary - Nicholas D Kristof of The New York Times.
Criticism - Robin Givhan of The Washington Post.
Editorial writing - Rick Attig and Doug Bates of The (Portland) Oregonian.
Editorial cartooning - Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Breaking news photography - Staff of The Dallas Morning News.
Feature photography - Todd Heisler of the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Colorado.
ARTS
Fiction - March, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
Drama - No Award
History - Polio: An American Story, by David M Oshinsky (OUP)
Biography - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin (Knopf)
Poetry - Late Wife, by Claudia Emerson (Louisiana State University Press)
General non-fiction - Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, by Caroline Elkins (Henry Holt)
Music - Piano Concerto: Chiavi in Mano, by Yehudi Wyner (Associated Music Publishers)
SPECIAL CITATIONS
- Edmund S Morgan, honoured for "his creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century".
- Thelonious Monk, honoured posthumously for "a body of distinguished and innovative musical composition that has had a significant and enduring impact on the evolution of jazz".
AP
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