donald trump jr. pulitzer fiction

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Donald Trump Jr. learned that the Pulitzer Prizes do award a prize for fiction

It's been awarded since 1918.

 

Stephanie Fillion

Tech

Posted on Mar 30, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 4:00 pm CDT

On Friday, after President Donald Trump tweeted about the New York Times and the Washington Post’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Russia, Donald Trump Jr. agreed with his father’s assessment that the prize should be taken away, “unless they give Pulitzer’s for fiction.”

There’s just one catch: The Pulitzer Prizes do award an annual prize for fiction work.

Twitter users, including past winners, quickly let Trump Jr. know about it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American author, won the award in 2016 for his book The Sympathizer and mentioned it to Trump Jr. “Actually, I think I won one of those Pulitzers for fiction,” he wrote.

Author Andrew Sean Greer posed with a photo of his Pulitzer for his novel, Less.

https://twitter.com/agreer/status/1112030803620302848

Another added a caption from the Pulitzer Prizes’ website as evidence that yes, the committee does award a prize for fiction.

Some Twitter users decided to make a joke about Trump Jr.’s errant apostrophe, too.

https://twitter.com/thommytsunami/status/1111822504987893761

Comedy writer Megan Amram just got “so fucking jealous” of how funny the tweet was.

Others just marveled at how ridiculous it was.

And then there are those that won’t let him live down his “S&L” snafu.

The Pulitzer Prizes awards seven prizes in the general category of Letters, Drama, and Music each year. Prizes are awarded in the categories of biography or autobiography, fiction, general nonfiction, history, poetry, drama, and music.

The first Pulitzer Prize for fiction was given in 1918, but at the time the category was called the Pulitzer Prize for the novel. It became the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1948.

The New York Times responded to the president’s original tweet, saying, “We’re proud of our Pulitzer-prize winning reporting on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. Every @nytimes article cited has proven accurate.”

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*First Published: Mar 30, 2019, 8:09 pm CDT