Pulitzer Prize
Columbia University on Monday announced the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winners and there was no winner in the fiction category this year. REUTERS

The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on 16 April.

The awards are the most prestigious in American journalism and one of the more important in global literary circles. The awards were established in 1917 and are administered by Columbia University in New York. Every winner gets a certificate and a £6,000 (approximately) cash award.

Check out the complete list of winners and finalists, across all categories, as reported by The New York Times:

Fiction: No award.

Drama: "Water by the Spoonful" by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Finalists: "Other Desert Cities" by Jon Robin Baitz and "Sons of the Prophet" by Stephen Karam.

History: "Malcom X: A Life of Reinvention," by Manning Marable

Finalists: "Empires, Nations & Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860" by Anne F. Hyde (University of Nebraska Press); "The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden" by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan (Ballantine Books); "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America" by Richard White (W.W. Norton & Company).

Biography: "George F.Kennan: An American Life," by John Lewis Gaddis(The Penguin Press)

Finalists: "Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution" by Mary Gabriel (Little, Brown and Company); "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" by Manning Marable (Viking).

Poetry: "Life on Mars," by Tracy K.Smith (Graywolf Press)

Finalists: "Core Samples from the World" by Forrest Gander (New Directions); "How Long" by Ron Padgett (Coffee House Press).

General Notification: "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern," by Stephen Greenblatt (W.W. Norton and Company)

Finalists: "One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing" by Diane Ackerman (W.W. Norton and Company); "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men" by Mara Hvistendahl (Public Affairs).

Music: Kevin Puts for "Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts" commissioned and premiered by the Minnesota Opera in Minneapolis on November 12.

Finalists: Tod Machover for "Death and the Powers" premiered by the Boston Modern Opera Project in Massachusetts on March 18; Andrew Norman for "The Companion Guide to Rome" premiered on November 13, in Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, in the journalism awards list, the Huffington Post was awarded its first Pulitzer this year. In the other awards, Sara Ganim and other members of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg won the Pulitzer for Local Reporting, for their coverage of the Penn State sex abuse scandal. Ganim is one of the youngest journalists ever to win a Pulitzer. The National Reporting award went to the Huffington Post's David Wood.

"It's unusual for someone that young to win, but heartening to see that we've got some young journalists that are coming up that are doing terrific work," Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler said to CNN, speaking on Ganim's win.

Moving on, reporting agency Associated Press (AP) won a Pulitzer for investigative journalism, as did The Seattle Times, for their inquiry into how a little-known governmental body in Washington state moved vulnerable patients from safer pain-control medication to methadone, a cheaper but more dangerous drug; coverage that prompted statewide health warnings, according to the Guardian.

The Pulitzer for the International Reporting went to Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times for his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa - a neglected but increasingly strategic part of the world.

The Pulitzer for Public Service was given to The Philadelphia Inquirer for its exploration of pervasive violence in the city's schools.

Breaking News Reporting: The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) News.

Investigative Reporting: The Seattle Times and AP

Public Service:The Philadelphia Inquirer

International Reporting: Jeffrey Gettleman, The New York Times

The New York Times New York