Charleston, South Carolina, Post and Courier wins Pulitzer gold medal in journalism for domestic abuse coverage

The 2015 Pulitzer Prize awards were announced on 20 April, with The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina winning the most distinguished journalism award for public service.

The Post and Courier's gold medal winning series, named Till Death Do Us Part, covered the deadly issue of domestic abuse in the state. According to the Pulitzer, The Boston Globe's series on poorly regulated, profit-driven housing system university students are subjected to and The Wall Street Journal's "Deadly Medicine" project about the cancer risk women incur during a common surgery were also finalists in the public service category.

For Breaking News Reporting, The Seattle Times staff took top honours, and $10,000 (£6,700), for their coverage of a landslide that left 43 dead. The staffs of The Buffalo News, which covered a lake-effect snowstorm, and the Los Angeles Times, which covered a shooting spree, were also finalists.

The $10,000 award for Investigative Reporting was won by the staff of The Wall Street Journal for their project called Medicare Unmasked and by Eric Lipton of The New York Times for his coverage of lobbyist influence on congressional leaders and state attorneys. The Chicago Tribune's David Jackson, Gary Marx and Suaa Eldeib were finalist in the category for their piece on the difficulties faced by abused children in state residential treatment centres.

Rob Kuznia, Rebecca Kismitch and Frank Suraci of the Daily Breeze in Torrence, California took home the $10,000 Local Reporting award for their coverage of corruption in a small, "cash-strapped" school district. Meanwhile, The Washington Post's Carol Leaning won the $10,000 National Reporting award for her continuous work on the Secret Service. The $10,000 International Reporting award was awarded to The New York Times Staff for their front-line coverage of the Ebola crisis in Africa.

The New York Times freelance photographer Daniel Berehulak took home the award for Feature Photography for his photos of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

In the arts categories, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See won for Fiction and Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History won for General Non-fiction. Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside and Crazy) took home top honours in Drama, while Gregory Pardlo (Digest) won the Poetry award.

Mike Pride, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, said that although all the winners except Bloomberg were from the world of print journalism, "the digital components of their work is becoming more and more sophisticated. Newspapers know where the future is."

A complete list of winners can be read here.