Lynn Nottage Play Wins Pulitzer Prize for Drama

'Ruined' picked for 2009 Award by Pulitzer Committee

Apr 20, 2009

American playwright Lynn Nottage wins the Pulitzer for her play 'Ruined,' about the war against Congolese women.

The official announcement from Columbia University states the Pulitzer Prize for Drama was “[a]warded to 'Ruined,' by Lynn Nottage, a searing drama set in chaotic Congo that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness.”

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama includes a cash award of $10,000 to playwright Lynn Nottage. The Pulitzer awards will be presented at a luncheon ceremony May 28, 2009.

Ruined had its world premiere in December 2008 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. Originally commissioned by the Goodman, Ruined opened February 2009 for a limited engagement off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club.

Nottage Interviewed Congolese Women

As part of, or perhaps more accurately, as the heart of her research, Nottage spent time at a Ugandan refugee camp. There she interviewed Congolese women who had been brutalized and raped in the civil war ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In a January 2009 interview by the New York Times. Nottage spoke of the play the research became: “I believe in engaging people emotionally, because I think they react more out of emotion” than when they are “preached to, told how to feel. It was important that this not become a documentary, or agitprop.”

Other Lynn Nottage Plays

Other plays Nottage has written include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Mud River Stone, Por’Knockers, and Intimate Apparel. Nottage said in an April 28, 2008 Los Angles Times article that she always writes two plays at the same time. Concurrently with Ruined, Nottage wrote By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. In an April 19, 2009 Los Angeles Times interview about Vera Stark, Nottage said about her work, “I am interested in the personal aspects of history, more than history in big, bold letters—the kinds of intersections that occur between people who might not normally come into contact.”

Other Awards for Lynn Nottage

Nottage won the Heideman Award in 1996. In 2004 for her play Intimate Apparel, she won the Francesca Primus Prize as well as the Steinberg Award. In 2007 she received a MacArthur Genius Award. The MacArthur Foundation cites Nottage as “an original voice in American theater, a playwright whose entertaining and thought-provoking works address contemporary issues with empathy and humor”

According to a 2005 interview by HistoryMakers, Nottage wrote her first play when she was eight years old. She received her MFA in playwrighting from the Yale School of Drama in 1989. Lynn Nottage was born in Brooklyn, New York.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama Facts

First awarded over 90 years ago in 1918, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama goes to American playwrights. There have been fourteen times the Board opted not to give an award for drama. Eugene O’Neill won the award four times, Edward Albee won three times, and August Wilson won twice. Twelve women, in addition to Nottage, have won the award. The most recent awards received by women playwrights went to Suzan-Lori Parks for Topdog/Underdog in 2002, Margaret Edson for Wit in 1999, and Paula Vogel for How I Learned to Drive in 1998.

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