Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kittredge, a collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine. (Jerry Bauer/Associated Press)

American playwright Lynn Nottage, fiction writer Elizabeth Strout and composer Steve Reich are among the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners, Columbia University announced Monday afternoon.

The $10,000 US prizes honour excellence in literature, musical composition and newspaper journalism, and are administered by Columbia University in New York.

Nottage took the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Ruined, a harrowing tale of survival set against the backdrop of an African civil war. Inspired by Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, the play focuses on the suffering of women, in particularly the inhabitants of a Congolese brothel owned by an earth mother named Mama Nadi.

Ruined is currently playing at off-Broadway's Manhattan Theatre Club and is a co-production with Chicago's Goodman Theatre, where it had its world première late last year.

Playwright Lynn Nottage won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Ruined. (Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press)

Strout received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of 13 linked stories set in a hardscrabble town in coastal Maine.

Reich, a U.S. composer who pioneered the style of minimalist music, received the music prize for Double Sextet. Premiered in the spring of 2008, the 22-minute work can be performed as a live sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano played against a pre-recorded sextet, or as an ensemble of 12 instrumentalists.

The other Pulitzer Prize arts recipients are:

• Annette Gordon-Reed, history, for The Hemingses of Monticello: an American Family. The sweeping story of three generations of an American slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, won the U.S. National Book Award last fall.
• Jon Meacham, biography, for American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, looks beyond Jackson's reputation as a hothead and focuses on his attempts to reshape the power of the presidency during his time in office – 1829 to 1837.
• Douglas A. Blackmon, general non-fiction, for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
• W.S. Merwin, poetry, for The Shadow of Sirius.

The journalism awards were announced after one of the worst years the U.S. newspaper industry has experienced, with layoffs, bankruptcies and closings.

The New York Times took five Pulitzers, including one for breaking the call girl scandal that destroyed the political career of former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

Steve Reich won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music for Double Sextet. (Pulitzer Board/Associated Press)

The Las Vegas Sun received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for exposing a high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip.

The Detroit Free Press won the prize for local reporting for obtaining sexually explicit text messages that brought down Detroit's mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick.

Other journalism Pulitzer winners are:

• Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart of the Los Angeles Times for explanatory reporting.
• Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., for local reporting.
• The St. Petersburg Times staff for national reporting.
• Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times for feature writing.
• Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post for commentary.
• Mark Mahoney of the Post-Star in Glens Falls, N.Y., for editorial writing.
• Patrick Farrell of the Miami Herald for breaking news photography.
• Damon Winter of the New York Times for feature photography.
• Steve Breen of the San Diego Union-Tribune for editorial cartooning.

With files from The Associated Press