Pulitzer prize awarded to poet laureate, screenwriter

NEW YORK -- Academy Award-winning screenplay writer John Patrick Shanley and the nation's poet laureate, Ted Kooser, were among the winners Monday of Pulitzer Prizes in the arts. Marilynne Robinson received the fiction award for "Gilead," her first novel in more than 20 years.\n"It's such a private thing to write a book, and when I'm writing I can't think about whether it will appeal to other people," said Robinson, a teacher at the celebrated University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, speaking breathlessly on her cell phone as she walked across campus. "But it's such a profound treat that people do find it meaningful."\nRobinson, who debuted in 1981 with the acclaimed "Housekeeping," already had won the National Book Critics Circle prize for "Gilead," a contemporary epistle of a dying Iowa preacher looking back on his life and the lives of his ancestors.\nHer win also continues a remarkable streak for her publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which for seven out of the past eight years has released a novel that received either the Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award. Those books include Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" and Shirley Hazzard's "The Great Fire."\nShanley, whose screenplay for "Moonstruck" won an Oscar in 1988, received the drama Pulitzer for "Doubt," his Broadway debut. \n"I have been trawling around for a long time before they let me come up out of the muck," the 54-year-old Shanley, who has been a playwright for 25 years, said with a laugh.\n"Doubt," set in the Bronx in 1964, tells the story of an authoritarian nun and her confrontations with a well-liked parish priest she suspects of molesting a male student. The playwright said the play was born out of his interest in the Catholic school world.\n"I went to a church in the Bronx in 1964. It was a such a specific world that has now vanished, a world involving the Sisters of Charity, who dressed in black robes and black bonnets," he said. "More recently, the world around me started to remind me in certain key ways of this time -- of people of conviction and people who weren't certain at odds with each other -- and their power struggle."\nDavid Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University, received the prize for history for "Washington's Crossing," a finalist last fall for the National Book Award. Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan won in the biography category for "de Kooning: An American Master." Stevens and Swan were about to work on their taxes with their accountant when they got the news.\n"We're very happy and surprised," Stevens said. "We think of the Pulitzer as a prize that ordinarily goes to generals and statesmen. We're very happy it sometimes goes to a painter, musician or writer."\nKooser won in poetry for "Delights and Shadows," making him the rare sitting laureate to receive such an award. Kooser, who lives in Garland, Neb., is a retired insurance executive who was named to his current position last August. He has written 10 collections of poetry, and his work has appeared in a number of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Hudson Review and Prairie Schooner.\n"It's something every poet dreams of," Kooser said of the Pulitzer in a statement released by the University of Nebraska. "There are so many gifted poets in this country and so many marvelous collections published each year. That mine has been selected is a great honor."\nSteve Coll collected his second Pulitzer, winning in general nonfiction for "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001." In 1990, while serving as South Asia bureau chief for The Washington Post, he captured a Pulitzer for explanatory journalism. The author of four books, he is now an associate editor at the Post.\n"I have a bottle (of champagne) here. I haven't opened it yet," he said.\nColl said he decided to write the book after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because he felt "those who lived through it when it was an obscure story really ought to try and put in perspective."\nThe music award went to Steven Stucky for "Second Concerto for Orchestra." Stucky, a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for "Concerto for Orchestra" finally won the honor Monday with the perhaps fittingly named "Second Concerto for Orchestra," which the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered March 12, 2004.\nWhen asked for his reaction by The Associated Press, Stucky described it as relief.\n"It is nice to get it over with," Stucky chuckled. "I've flirted with it a couple of times"