<p>The</a> Pulitzer Prizes | 2009 Pulitzer Prizewinners and Nominated Finalists
The</a> Pulitzer Prizes | Citation
The</a> Pulitzer Prizes | Biography
W</a>. S. Merwin ★ Steven Barclay Agency</p>
<p>The 2009 Pulitzer Prizes have just been announced. Princeton graduate and honored American poet, W.S. Merwin '48 has won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection of poems entitled "The Shadow of Sirius".</p>
<p>"W.S. Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister. He attended Princeton University, where he studied with John Berryman and R.P. Blackmur. Merwin spent a postgraduate year at Princeton studying Romance languages, an interest that would lead eventually to his much-admired work as translator of Latin, Spanish, and French poetry. After leaving Princeton, Merwin traveled to France, Spain, and England. He settled in Majorca in 1950 as a tutor to Robert Graves's son. Graves, with his interest in mythology, would become a primary influence on young Merwin.</p>
<p>Merwin's first book of poems won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for 1952, selected by W.H. Auden, who remarked in his introduction on the young poet's technical virtuosity. That volume, A Mask for Janus, is formal, neoclassical in style. For the next decade Merwin would regularly publish collections of intensely wrought, brightly imagistic poems.</p>
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<p>Last year three Princetonians were awarded Pulitzers: Bart Gellman '82 for National Reporting, John Matteson '83 for Biography and Ian Shapira '00 for Breaking News Reporting.</p>
<p>This year, the Ivies were well represented. Every undergraduate college in the Ivy League had a graduate who won a Pulitzer with the exception of Penn and Yale. The other winners from the Ivy League were:</p>
<p>Drama-----Lynn Nottage (Brown)
History----Annette Gordon-Reed (Dartmouth)
Poetry-----W.S. Merwin (Princeton)
Music------Steve Reich (Cornell)
Criticism--Holland Cotter (Harvard)
Feature Photography --Damon Winter (Columbia)</p>
<p>Two of the winners also have Ivy League graduate degrees, Nottage (Yale Graduate School of Drama) and Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law School).</p>
<p>Congratulations to all.</p>