IRISH American writer Frank McCourt has won the Pulitzer prize for his autobiography, Angela's Ashes, a best selling memoir named after his mother about the privations of his family's life, first in New York, then in Limerick and finally back in the city of his birth.
The prize, announced last night in New York, is America's most prestigious literary award. Mr McCourt (66) was born there, one of six children, but left for Ireland at the age of four and spent nearly 15 years living in slum housing on Myles Lane in Limerick.
Though he had left school at the age of 13, Mr McCourt later studied English at New York University and became a teacher in a New York high school, a post he held for 27 years. "I don't see myself as Irish or American - I'm a New Yorker", he once said.
The other Pulitzer prizes went to composer Wynton Marsalis, novelist Steven Millhauser, poet Lisel Mueller, historian Jack Rakove, journalist John F. Burns of The New York Time and non fiction writer Richard Kluger for his book Ashes to Ashes: America's 100 Year Cigarette War.