The Pulitzer Prizes, whose 2026 honorees were announced this week, reward excellent American journalism, music, drama, and books. Public conversation about the six categories of book awards tends to focus on the fiction prize, especially in years when the winner is unusually commercial, such as 2018’s Less , or obscure, like this year’s Angel Down , or not chosen at all, as in 2012. The medal for poetry gets little attention, and critics seldom scrutinize the four nonfiction selections. But if