Aretha Franklin Wins Pulitzer Posthumous Award

The Queen of Souls is now Pulitzer Prize winner.

Aretha Franklin received a special quote for "his indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades".

She becomes the 12th musician and the first female performer to be named – joining Bob Dylan, Scott Joplin and John Coltrane.

Franklin died of pancreatic cancer last August, at the age of 76 years.

During her career, the singer won 18 Grammys, 17 times in the top 10 US charts and became the first woman to be admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Artist with immense versatility, his powerful voice, formed in the tradition of gospel, embraced jazz, soul, rhythm and blues.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked it as the greatest singer of all time, thanks to songs such as Respect, Chain Of Fools and (you make me feel) a natural woman.

• Obituary: Aretha Franklin
• An American newspaper wins the Pulitzer that he did not want

The Pulitzer Prize for Music this year has been awarded to Ellen Reid's opera [sic].

The Pulitzer jury described this piece as "a bold new operatic work that uses sophisticated vocal writing and striking instrumental timbres to deal with a difficult subject: the effects of badual and emotional abuse".

"It sounds unreal – like I'm going to wake up!" says the composer born in Tennessee.

She described her winning opera as both stimulating and personal, but added that it was designed not to alienate the public.

"There is something in this article that makes people who have not been badually badaulted understand a little more about what it might look like," she told American radio. NPR.

The Pulitzers also honor the best of literature, theater and journalism.

Jackie Sibblies Drury won the Fairview Theater Award, a play that appears to be a black family comedy in the style of The Cosby Show or A Different World, but takes unexpected turns, both for the characters on stage and for the public.

The Pulitzer Jury described it as "a hard-hitting drama that examines the race in a very conceptual layered structure, ultimately causing the audience in the community of actors to deal with deep-seated prejudices."

The novelist Richard Powers won the fictional award of The Overstory, a multi-narrative narrative of nine Americans united in a natural disaster. while David W Blight received the award for his acclaimed biography of Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave turned leader of the abolitionist movement.

The New York Times and the Washington Post won journalism awards for their coverage of President Trump, while a special mention was made to staff at the Capital Gazette, a Maryland newspaper that suffered a deadly attack in its newsroom.

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