Jill Lepore, Yiyun Li win Pulitzers

The book side of the Pulitzer Prizes landed on a sharp contrast this year — one winner zoomed out to the U.S. Constitution, the other stayed inside private grief. On May 4, 2026, Jill Lepore won the Pulitzer in history for *We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution*, and Yiyun Li won memoir or autobiography for *Things in Nature Merely Grow*. The pairing is the story. It says something about what the prizes wanted to honor right now — civic argument on one side, unbearable intimacy on the other. (pulitzer.org) ### What exactly did Jill Lepore win for? Lepore won the history prize for a book about the Constitution, but not in the usual chest-thumping way. The Pulitzer board’s description focuses on why the document is so hard to amend and on the failed amendments proposed by marginalized groups. Basically, the prize went to a cons(pulitzer.org)te. (pulitzer.org) ### Why is that a notable angle? Because lots of Constitution books ask how the system works. Lepore’s book asks who kept trying to change it — and who got shut out. That shifts the center of gravity. The Constitution stops being a sacred object on a pedestal and starts looking like a contested machine that many Americans have trie(pulitzer.org)ry, even though the prize is for a deeply historical work. (pulitzer.org) ### What did Yiyun Li win for? Li won in memoir or autobiography for *Things in Nature Merely Grow*, a book the Pulitzer site calls a deeply moving and revelatory account of losing her younger son to suicide, a little more than six years after her older son died the same way. The citation also points to the book’s style — austere, (pulitzer.org)se it tells you what kind of memoir this is not. It is not built around uplift or neat resolution. (pulitzer.org) ### Why does Li’s win stand out? Partly because the category itself is still new. Memoir or autobiography only became a current Pulitzer books category in 2023. So Li is winning in a lane the Pulitzers are still defining in public. And her book is not a safe or sentimental choice for that job — it is severe, exacting, and resistant to consolation. That gives the category a clearer identity fast. (pulitzer.org) ### What’s the Princeton angle? Li teaches at Princeton as a professor of creative writing and directs the Program in Creative Writing there. Princeton also highlighted that alumna Katie Kitamura was a fiction finalist and incoming Hodder Fellow Nazareth Hassan was a drama finalist. So for the university, this was not just one faculty win. It was a strong year across the arts categories. (princeton.edu) ### Was there anything else easy to miss? Yes — the standard Pulitzer books purse is still $15,000. That is not life-changing money for a major author, but the real effect is prestige, sales, course adoption, festival bookings, and renewed attention. Also, Jill Lepore is not a newcomer to Pulitzer(princeton.edu)op. (pulitzer.org) ### So what does this year’s pairing say? It says the Pulitzers wanted range, but not randomness. One winning book explains a national framework. The other records the aftermath of personal catastrophe. Put together, they sketch a broad idea of seriousness in American letters — public institutions still matter, and so does the hardest private testimony. (pulitzer.org) ### Bottom line The cleanest way to read these wins is this: the 2026 Pulitzers rewarded two kinds of endurance — the long struggle to change a country’s rules, and the day-by-day struggle to keep living after irreversible loss. (pulitzer.org)