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The 2026 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama
For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Liberation, by Bess Wohl

A striking blend of comedy and sincerity that explores the legacy of the consciousness-raising feminist groups of the 1970s, using the story of the playwright’s mother to demonstrate how the movement grew out of conversation, and that anyone experiencing the play has joined the discussion.

Winning Work

Liberation

By

Bess Wohl

Liberation and A Streetcar Named Desire | THEATER: All the Moving Parts (CUNY TV)

1970, Ohio. Lizzie gathers a small group of women to talk. But talking quickly becomes a necessary and bracingly funny attempt to change their own lives and the world. Fifty years later, her daughter is shocked to find herself asking the very same questions her mother did, and goes on a search through the past for answers.

From Tony Award® nominees Bess Wohl (Grand Horizons) and Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding) comes a provocative, revealing, and irreverent jolt of a play about what really goes on when women meet behind closed doors.

-- from the Roundabout Theatre Company production page

Biography

Bess Wohl’s many plays have been produced on and off Broadway, regionally, and internationally. They include Grand Horizons (Broadway, Tony Nomination for Best Play), Camp Siegfried, Make Believe, Continuity, Small Mouth Sounds, American Hero, Barcelona, Touched, In, Cats Talk Back and the musical Pretty Filthy. She recently made her feature film debut, Baby Ruby, starring Noémie Merlant and Kit Harington. The film premiered at the 2022 Toronto Film Festival and was released by Magnolia Pictures in early 2023. She also wrote for the Apple TV+ series, “Extrapolations.”

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2026:

Nazareth Hassan

A play focused on two skateboarders, aspiring hip-hop artists who begin to compose an album, with downtime fueling their creative process and nascent romance.

Talene Monahon

A drama that uses the historical lens of the Armenian American experience to illustrate the enduring hypocrisies of our country’s racialized system of immigration.

The Jury

Helen Shaw(Chair)

Theatre Critic, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Quiara Alegría Hudes*

Playwright and Author, New York City

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins*

Playwright and Professor in the Practice of Theater and Performance Studies, Yale University

Charles McNulty

Theatre Critic, Los Angeles Times

Harvey Young

Dean, College of Fine Arts; Interim Vice President for the Arts; Professor of English, Theatre Arts, American Studies and African American & Black Diaspora Studies, Boston University

Winners in Drama

2025

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

A play about the complex dynamics and legacy of an upper middle class African-American family whose patriarch was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, a skillful blend of drama and comedy that probes how different generations define heritage.
2024

Eboni Booth

A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community.
2023

Sanaz Toossi

A quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran, where family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life.
2022

James Ijames

A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes "Hamlet" to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.
See All Drama

2026 Prize Winners

Opinion Writing

M. Gessen of The New York Times

For an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.
See All 2026 Winners