Arts & culture, Awards, Campus news, Literature, People

Six UC Berkeley alumni named 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners

Also honored were Pulitzer finalists from Berkeley Journalism — several alumni, a faculty member and the Investigative Reporting Program.

By Public Affairs

May 8, 2025

An image of the Pulitzer Prize medal shows the front and the back. The medal is gold, with the image of Ben Franklin on one side and on the back is someone operating a printing press.
The Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal, featuring Ben Franklin on one side and a printer at work on the other, is awarded each year to the American news organization that wins the public service category. But over time, the medal has come to symbolize the entire Pulitzer program.

This week, the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners announced by Columbia University included six UC Berkeley alumni, and additional members of the campus community were finalists for the prestigious award.

Announced each May, the prizes are considered the country’s most sought-after awards in journalism, arts and letters and have been awarded since 1917. Newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who died in 1911, left money to Columbia University to launch a journalism school and establish the Pulitzer Prize. An independent Pulitzer Prize Board selects the winners.

This year’s Berkeley-affiliated winners are:

  • Berkeley Journalism alumni Parker Yesko and Catherine Winter. They were on the New Yorker team that won the prize in audio reporting for the third season of “In the Dark,” podcasts on the 2005 killing in Haditha, Iraq, of unarmed Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines.
  • Berkeley Journalism alumnus Greg Winter. He was one of the main editors for the New York Times’ coverage of the ongoing civil war in Sudan, for which Declan Walsh and the Times’ staff were awarded the international reporting prize. He also was a main editor for the explanatory reporting that won a Pulitzer on the history of the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
  • History alumnus Benjamin Nathans, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He won the general nonfiction prize for To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement. The book resulted from more than 20 years of research into K.G.B. case files, unpublished diaries and private correspondence.
  • At the Houston Chronicle, Sharon Steinmann, an anthropology alumna who is an opinion video journalist, and art history alumna Leah Binkovitz, a senior editorial writer. They won, along with two other colleagues, for distinguished editorial writing for a series on dangerous train crossings that kept readers focused on the people and communities at risk.

To read more about these winners and prizes, please see a Berkeley Journalism story, which includes impressive news of many Pulitzer Prize finalists from the school; a College of Letters and Science article about the two social sciences alumni who won; and a second story from the college about the winner who is an art history alumna.