Junot Díaz has been announced as the winner of this year's Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber).

Other category winners are:

• History: What Hath God Wrought: the Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Daniel Walker Howe, OUP) 
• Biography: Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (John Matteson, W W Norton) 
• Poetry: Time and Materials (Robert Hass, HarperCollins) and Failure (Philip Schultz, Harcourt US)
• General Nonfiction: The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Saul Friedlander, Orion) 
• Tracy Letts won the drama prize for August: Osage County and Bob Dylan was given a special citation in music. 

The Pulitzer awards each carry a prize of US$10,000 (A$10,500).

Diaz will be in Australia in May as a guest of Sydney Writers' Festival, where he'll be delivering the closing address.

This article from Thorpe Bowker's Weekly Book Newsletter and Media Extra is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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