American rapper, Kendrick Lamar, has became first rapper to win a Pulitzer prize for his 2017 album ‘Damn’.
The rapper was on Monday announced as the recipient of the 2018 Pulitzer prize for music.
The names of the honorees were reeled out at the Columbia School of Journalism, New York.
The New Yorker and The New York Times’ were jointly honoured for their coverage of the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal while The Washington Post won for investigative reporting.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a freelance reporter for GQ, won for feature writing while Martyna Majok won for her play ‘Cost of Living’.
Praising Lamar’s ‘Damn’ for its social relevance, the Pulitzer Prize described the 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”.
‘Damn’, a critically acclaimed and commercially successful album, was nominated for multiple Grammy awards, winning best rap album.
It was a follow-up to Lamar’s 2015 album ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ which has been hailed as a hip-hop classic.
Lamar’s ‘Alright’, a song from ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’, became an unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement.
