The winners of 2018 Pulitzer Prize were announced on Monday at the Columbia University in New York. Pulitzer Prize administrator Dana Canedy announced the awards for various categories in journalism and arts.

The New York Times and the New Yorker were jointly awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service, for investigations into allegations of sexual harassment and assault against former Hollywood movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

The New York Times also shared the prize for national reporting with The Washington Post for their coverage of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election.

“Their work is real news of the highest order, executed nobly as journalism was always intended, without fear or favour,” Pulitzer administrator Canedy said.

Californian daily The Press Democrat received the breaking news award for its coverage of the devastating wildfires in the state in 2017. The Arizona Republic, together with the USA Network, were awarded the explanatory journalism award for a series on the proposed border wall between the US and Mexico.

Reuters won the international reporting award for its coverage that exposed “the brutal killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs”.

Photographer Ryan Kelly of the Daily Progress in Charlottesville won the breaking news photography award for capturing the exact moment a car struck protestors during a clash between white supremacists and demonstrators. Reuters, on the other hand, won the feature photography award for pictures that “exposed the world to the violence Rohingya refugees faced in fleeing Myanmar”.

US-based rapper Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music. He is the first non-classical, non-jazz artist to win the prize. Lamar won the award for his 2017 album Damn. It is the first piece of popular music to receive the award since it was instituted in 1943.

The prize listing describes Lamar’s album as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life”.

The other winners outside of the journalism categories were Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, for fiction; Cost of Living by Martyna Majok for drama; The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea by Jack E Davies for US history and Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, by Caroline Fraser, for biography.

Frank Bidart won the poetry award for his collection Half-Light and James Forman Junior won the non-fiction award for Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.