Two University alumni were awarded 2020 Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism this week.
Ben Taub ’14, a staff writer at The New Yorker, received the Pulitzer for Feature Writing for “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret,” which the jury described as “a devastating account of a man who was kidnapped, tortured and deprived of his liberty for more than a decade at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.”
Taub, who has previously won two George Polk Awards for Magazine Reporting, took four journalism courses while a student at Princeton, including “Investigative Journalism” with Joe Stephens, “International News” with Deborah Amos, and “Politics and the Media” with Carol Giacomo. He now reports on subjects such as jihadism, crime, conflict, and human rights, mostly in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
Juliet Eilperin ’94 and colleagues at The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for “a groundbreaking series that showed with scientific clarity the dire effects of extreme temperatures on the planet.”
In comments given to The Daily Princetonian, Eilperin dated her work in journalism to the time she spent as managing editor of the student newspaper: “For someone who’s been working on journalism since my time at Princeton and since the day I left the gates, it’s pretty great to win something like this.”
Another Princetonian recognized this year is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, whose book “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership” was named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in History. Taylor is an assistant professor and the Charles H. Mcilwain University Preceptor in the Department of African American Studies.
