Greer and Bidart honoured with Pulitzer Prizes

Novelist Andrew Sean Greer and poet Frank Bidart were among those awarded Pulitzer Prizes this year, alongside rapper Kendrick Lamar and the New York Times team which broke the Harvey Weinstein story.

Greer won the prize for fiction for Less (Lee Boudreaux Books), a "scintillating satire" about the American abroad, which follows Arthur Less, a novelist on the verge of 50 who, feeling the humiliations of life and career, reluctantly accepts invitations to a string of disastrous literary events. The title has also been longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award and the California Book Award.

Bidart won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection Half-Light (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which brings together 50 years of the poet's work, while the non-fiction award went to James Forman Jr for Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Macmillan USA), an exploration of the disproportionate impact the rise in mass incarceration in the US is having on people of colour. Caroline Fraser took home the award for biography for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Fleet), a look into the life of the celebrated creator of the Little House on the Prairie series of books.

Other winners of Pulitzer Prizes included the New York Times and New Yorker magazine for their reporting on sexual harassment allegations in Hollywood, which exposed decades of alleged misconduct by film producer Harvey Weinstein and sparked the #MeToo Movement.

The New York Times also shared another prize with The Washington Post for coverage of Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

This year, rapper Kendrick Lamar became the first non-classical or jazz artist to scoop the music award for his album DAMN.