The Atlantic employees author Jennifer Senior has received the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Characteristic Writing. She was awarded journalism’s high honor for her outstanding September 2021 cowl story, “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” which checked out one household’s heartbreaking loss within the 9/11 assaults and their battle to maneuver on. That is The Atlantic’s second Pulitzer Prize, following Ed Yong’s 2021 Pulitzer for his reporting on the coronavirus pandemic.
The Pulitzer Board cited Senior’s “unflinching portrait of a household’s reckoning with loss within the 20 years since 9/11, masterfully braiding the creator’s private connection to the story with delicate reporting that reveals the lengthy attain of grief.”
“What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” advised of a captivating, formidable younger man named Bobby McIlvaine, who attended a convention within the World Commerce Heart on September 11, 2001. Like hundreds of different Individuals that day, he by no means got here residence. On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 assaults, Senior traced the fallout from her good friend Bobby’s demise, writing that she’d spent the years since watching “as everybody within the blast radius of this horrific occasion tried to make sense of it.” Her story, about love and grief, examined one household’s battle to maneuver ahead. By way of interviews with Bobby’s mother and father, his brother, his then-girlfriend, and his buddies, Senior described how his household and buddies shifted from praying collectively that Bobby was okay to processing the traumatic loss in numerous methods. Their grief pulled them aside and created unresolved rigidity about what had actually occurred within the weeks and months after 9/11.
The Pulitzer Prize follows Senior successful within the Characteristic Writing class on the 2022 Nationwide Journal Awards, the annual honors from the American Society of Journal Editors. The Atlantic additionally earned the highest honor of Basic Excellence for a Information, Sports activities, and Leisure publication on the 2022 Nationwide Journal Awards.
The Pulitzers additional acknowledged the extraordinary work at The Atlantic; Workers author Sophie Gilbert has been named a finalist within the Criticism class; the article “To Hell With Drowning,” by the freelance author Julian Aguon, is a finalist in Commentary; and Zeynep Tufekci’s work for The Atlantic and The New York Occasions made her a finalist in Commentary as nicely.
“This can be a fantastic second for the writers who’ve earned this well-deserved recognition,” says Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. “Jennifer’s story, her first for The Atlantic, is without doubt one of the most subtle items of journal journalism we’ve ever encountered, a miracle of narrative, advised with unmatched ability, empathy, and eloquence. Scott Stossel, her good editor, has beforehand famous the symphonic high quality of this story, and the way masterfully Jennifer pulled off the reporting, the writing, and the structuring. Scott, after all, deserves credit score for a lot of our greatest work, together with Jennifer’s piece.”
Senior joined The Atlantic as a employees author in 2021. Previous to that, she was a columnist for the New York Occasions op-ed web page. Earlier than becoming a member of Opinion, Senior was one of many Occasions’s three day by day e-book critics. She spent virtually 20 years as a employees author for New York journal, writing profiles and canopy tales about politics, social science, and psychological well being. Senior can also be the creator of the massively widespread e-book All Pleasure and No Enjoyable: The Paradox of Fashionable Parenthood.
