Late Aretha Franklin, Ellen Reid Awarded 2019 Pulitzer Prize

Legendary music star, Aretha Franklin, has been posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution to American music and culture.

Also, composer, Ellen Reid was also awarded this year’s Pulitzer music award for her opera “Prism,’’ which premiered at the Los Angeles Opera last fall.

Franklin, who passed away in August 2018 at age 76 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was honored with the Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

She became the first individual woman to receive a special citation prize, which was first awarded in 1930.

The iconic music star became the 12th musician, and first female performer, to be given the citation – joining the likes of Bob Dylan, Scott Joplin and John Coltrane.

Franklin, whose powerful voice, trained in the gospel tradition, moved on to embrace jazz, soul and rhythm and blues had won 18 Grammys, had 17 top 10 US chart hits and became the first woman admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Pulitzers also honour the best in literature, theatre, and journalism.

Jackie Sibblies Drury won the drama prize for “Fairview’’, a play which seems to be a black family comedy in the style of The Cosby Show or A Different World.

Similarly, novelist Richard Powers won the fiction prize for “The Overstory’’, a multi-narrative look at nine Americans who are brought together unfolding natural catastrophe.

While David Blight picked up the history prize for his acclaimed biography of Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave who became a leader of the abolitionist movement.

The New York Times and Washington Post won journalism awards for their coverage of President Trump, while there was a special citation for the staff of Capital Gazette.