Your guide to the Pulitzer Prizes: Fun facts and Pulitzer-winning shows to see right now

The coveted prize has been given to one play or musical nearly every year since 1917.

The Pulitzer Prize. It just sounds fancy and prestigious. And it is: The Pulitzer Prizes are some of the most coveted awards in the arts, which of course includes theatre. One excellent show per year gets the sought-after prize, and amid all the great theatre that premieres each year, winning a Pulitzer puts a playwright and/or composer in a very special category of people.

This is true especially if they've won other awards: There's a special variation on the already-rare EGOT honor (given to those who've won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award) called the PEGOT, which includes the Pulitzer. (Lin-Manuel Miranda, for one, has this honor within reach.) Pulitzer winners and Best Play or Musical Tony winners are sometimes one and the same, and their accolades are often just the start of long Broadway runs and plenty of revivals down the line.

We've answered all your questions about the Pulitzer Prizes — what they are, when to find out this year's Pulitzer winners, and which writers have set Pulitzer records and achieved Pulitzer firsts. Plus, check out all the Pulitzer-winning shows and writers represented on and off Broadway right now, and then get tickets to see these celebrated shows.

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What is the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is an annual award that recognizes excellence in theatre. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama is one of many Pulitzer Prizes — a total of 21 are awarded each year, but the Drama prize was one of the original seven when the awards were founded in 1917. The prize is named for famous newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Columbia University in New York administers the Pulitzer Prizes, as the awards were founded when Pulitzer gave the university an endowment.

How many Pulitzer Prize winners are there per year?

There are 21 winners per year which are awarded across 21 total categories; besides drama, there are Pulitzers in categories like music, journalism, literature, and public service. Only one show gets the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Drama each year. The winner of each category (either a person or group) is selected from three finalists. Even if a show doesn't win, getting picked as a finalist is still a major honor.

When are the Pulitzer Prize winners announced?

Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists are announced each spring, generally in May, and the winners usually gather at a later ceremony at Columbia University to receive their prizes. In 2023, Pulitzer winners and finalists were announced on May 8, and Sanaz Toossi's English took home the prize.

Fun facts about the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama has a storied history filled with fun facts, having been around for 105 years and counting.

• Only 10 musicals have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In chronological order, they are Of Thee I Sing, South Pacific, Fiorello!, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, A Chorus Line, Sunday in the Park With George, Rent, Next to Normal, Hamilton, and A Strange Loop. How many have you seen?
• A Strange Loop achieved multiple firsts when it won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Michael R. Jackson's show was the first musical by a Black writer to win, and the first musical to win the Pulitzer before playing on Broadway.
• Only one woman has won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: Lynn Nottage. She won in 2009 for Ruined and in 2017 for Sweat.
• Nowadays, a five-person jury travels cross-country to see shows and chooses the annual winner, but the Pulitzer board can overrule their choice. This has happened 15 times, so no drama Pulitzers were awarded those years.
• Eugene O'Neill has the most Pulitzers of any playwright, winning four. He and Edward Albee would be tied, but one of Albee's wins got overruled. The awards committee selected Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the 1963 prize, but the advisory board disallowed it because the play contained profanity and sexual themes.
• On the flip side, the 1955 awards committee didn't want to give Tennessee Williams the Pulitzer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In fact, the show was their last choice among the five nominees that year. However, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr. — the grandson of the awards' namesake — pressured them into choosing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Pulitzer Prize-winning shows on Broadway

It's rare to have so many acclaimed shows in one place at once, but if it's possible anywhere, it's possible on Broadway. Multiple Pulitzer-winning shows from the last few decades are taking the stage this season (and some never left since winning the prize). When you go see a Pulitzer Prize-winning play or musical, you know you're in for some excellent theatre.

Hamilton

Having just started a hip-hop revolution on Broadway and exploded to quick worldwide fame, Hamilton was practically a shoo-in for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize. Lin-Manuel Miranda's show about the life of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, as told with rap songs and a diverse cast, would go on to pick up 11 trophies at the 2016 Tony Awards, dubbed the "Hamiltonys." "Hamil-Pulitzers" doesn't have the same ring to it, but the prize cemented Miranda's name and his show in theatre history.

Get Hamilton tickets now.

Doubt

This play about the sacred and profane won John Patrick Shanley a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. Already known as an Oscar winner for Moonstruck, Shanley cemented his place among the theatre greats with this work. Doubt centers on Sister Aloysius, a nun who suspects Father Flynn, a priest at the Catholic school where she's principal, of improper relations with a student. Are her suspicions founded, or are they just doubt?

Get Doubt tickets now.

English

Sanaz Toossi's English premiered off Broadway in 2022, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, and is coming to Broadway in 2024. What a journey — especially for a show that marked the playwright's Off-Broadway debut. English is set entirely in an English language class in Iran, where four adult students and their teacher discover, debate, and decide what learning English means to them — and what parts of their cultural identity they might lose in the process.

Check back for information on English tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writers on Broadway

Amid the Pulitzer-winning shows in New York right now, there are plenty of other shows that didn't win the prize, but were written by playwrights and composers who've won for other works. You can see the work of Pulitzer-winning writers on Broadway right now, in which these award-winning writers' talent still shines brightly through.

Stephen Sondheim

Longtime collaborators Stephen Sondheim is behind multiple celebrated Broadway musicals. But only one, Sunday in the Park with George, won the Pulitzer Prize, becoming only the sixth musical to do so in 1985. If you missed its last Broadway revival, which starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford in 2017, you can still catch more of his best-known shows. The Tony-winning, murderous musical thriller Sweeney Todd is back on stage with a star-studded cast led by Josh Groban and Ashford, and Merrily We Roll Along is back for the first time with Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe, and Lindsay Mendez, going from a onetime flop to a hit.

Get Sweeney Todd tickets now.

Get Merrily We Roll Along tickets now.

Lynn Nottage

Lynn Nottage will forever be iconic for her double Pulitzer win. Her writing career is still going strong — maybe she'll pick up another someday! In the meantime, she's had a banner theatre year that rivals the years she won Pulitzers. For a brief period at the beginning of 2022, she had a play (Clyde's), a musical (MJ, the Michael Jackson bio-musical for which she wrote the book), and an opera (Intimate Apparel, for which she adapted her same-named play into a libretto) playing in New York all at once. MJ The Musical is the only one you can catch right now, but new Nottage is always popping up. Maybe next season, she'll debut her next Pulitzer-winning show.

Get MJ The Musical tickets now.

David Lindsay-Abaire

In 2007, playwright David Lindsay-Abaire won the coveted Pulitzer for Rabbit Hole, a play about a family dealing with loss that won Cynthia Nixon a Tony Award for acting. Seven years earlier, Lindsay-Abaire also earned acclaim for Kimberly Akimbo, a play about a teenage girl with a disease that makes her age four times faster than normal. Lindsay-Abaire teamed up with composer Jeanine Tesori to give that show the musical treatment in 2021, and a successful Off-Broadway premiere led to its "letter-perfect" Broadway debut in 2022.

Get Kimberly Akimbo tickets now.

Paula Vogel

In 1997, Paula Vogel made an indelible mark on the American theatre with her tender, twisting, thought-provoking masterpiece How I Learned to Drive. Troubled familial relationships are a topic she knows how to navigate — indeed, Drive is about a girl sexually abused by her uncle — and she tackles an entirely different kind of family in her newest Broadway work, Mother Play. Jessica Lange, Jim Parsons, and Celia Keenan-Bolger star as a mother and her two children, who must cope with the fact that they're all finding paths different than who they're expected to be.

Get Mother Play tickets now.