Andrea Long Chu Wins Pulitzer Prize for Criticism

Andrea Long Chu, acontributortoArtforumand its recently shuttered sister publicationBookforum, has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. A book critic atNew Yorkmagazinesince 2021, she was honored on the strength of five stories she wrote for that publication last year:“Hanya’s Boys,”about the characters of novelist Hanya Yanagahara’s books;“Ottessa Mosfegh Is Praying for Us,”about the polarizing author’s desire to “purify” her readers, embodied in her 2022 bookLapvona;“The Mixed Metaphor,”which examines the anxiety surrounding the half-Asian, half-white protagonist;“The Velveteen Rabbit Was Always More Than a Children’s Book,”which explores the Margery Williams Bianco classic as an allegory for the passage to adulthood; and“Misreading Octavia Butler,”about unintended interpretations of the writer’s mid-1980s noveletteBloodchild.RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD “Each of her subjects is a portal into something broader,” saidNew Yorkeditor in chief David Haskell at the time of her hiring, “and each of her reviews you end up mulling hours after you put them down.” The Brooklyn-based Chu has written for theNew Yorker, theNew York Times, andn+1, among other publications. Her bookFemaleswas selected as a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction, and her essays have appeared inThe Best American Essays 2022andThe Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. Among the runners-up for the esteemed award was formerArtforumcontributorJason Farago, now an art critic for theNew York Times. Farago was chosen for several articles about the Russian attack on Ukraine’s effect on the latter country’sart and culture, and for close looks at Jasper Johns’s 1961In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O’Haraand the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s“Cubism and the Trompe L’Oeil Tradition.”A regular contributor to the BBC, theNew Yorker, and NPR, the New York–based Farago (“rhymes with ‘Chicago,’” his bio helpfully notes) wasThe Guardian’s first US art critic.

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