Pulitzer awarded to Mexican Cristina Rivera

Mexico City. The Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza won one of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes for her book Liliana’s invincible summer, in which he tells the story of the femicide of his younger sister in 1990. This is the first time that a person of Mexican nationality has won that award in a literature category.

After the announcement, broadcast yesterday from Columbia University, it was highlighted that the poet and narrator elaborated in Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice (Hogarth) a retelling of Liliana’s murder perpetrated by an ex-boyfriend, through a mixture of memoir, feminist investigative journalism and poetic biography, stitched with a determination born of loss.

The two-time winner of the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize has maintained that the title is what I had tried to write all my life; This is the fundamental story of my existence and, of course, it is a book for which I had to grow as a person and as a writer.. The volume earned him the 2021 Xavier Villaurrutia Award.

Rivera Garza commented in a conversation held in September 2023 that this is the work that took him the most years to write and for which he had to find an appropriate language in order to tell that story and not from the perspective of the perpetrator. I was finally able to try to do that thanks to the boxes where my sister had kept a very extensive archive that she built of herself..

On that occasion, he stated that Finding those boxes represented the possibility of building his voice from within; Right there I took on the task of thinking about the ties that I would have to make visible, so that Liliana’s voice would be interwoven with others.. She added that her intention as an author was for readers to have that living and powerful contact with Liliana.

In 2013, Mexicans Alexandra Xanic von Bertrab, Narciso Contreras and Javier Manzano won the award in the area of ​​Investigative Reporting. Then Julio Cortez (2021) and María Hinojosa (2022) obtained it in other areas of journalism.

In this edition, Mexican photographers Christian Chávez and Félix Márquez were also recognized.

The writer Cristina Rivera Garza captured in April 2017. Photo María Luisa Severiano

This year, special recognitions were announced for the late writer Greg Tate, who specialized in African-American music and culture, and generally for journalists and workers covering the Gaza war, which Under appalling conditions, an extraordinary number have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and other Gazans. This war has also claimed the lives of poets and writers.

Brandon Som won the Poetry award for a collection of texts that explores the complexities of the author’s dual Mexican and Chinese heritage.

In the 2024 edition, Jacqueline Jones won the prize in the History Section, for a book that reconstructs the life of free blacks in Boston, which profoundly changes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the difficult reality of its black residents.

In Biography, Jonathan Eig and Ilyon Woo won the award. The first portrays the African-American leader Martin Luther King Jr, while Woo recovers the life of an enslaved couple who escaped in 1848 and gained fame as an abolitionist.

In the Non-Fiction category, Nathan Thrall won for a book that meticulously and intimately recounts life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation. In Fiction, it was awarded to Jayne Anne Phillips. Eboni Booth won the award in Drama. Tyshawn Sorey was recognized for the award in Music, for Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith).

In the journalism aspects, investigations on inequalities that affect marginalized communities stand out, such as that of Hannah Dreier on the conditions of migrant child labor in the United States and the complaint made by Sarah Stillman about the murder and its devastating consequences for the black community .

Sarah Conway and Trina Reynolds-Tyler were recognized for an investigation into missing black girls and women in Chicago, which revealed systemic racism and police neglect.

The awards, established in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, are administered by Columbia University in New York, which has recently been in the news for student demonstrations against the war in Gaza.