Reclusive novelist Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for her third novel, The Goldfinch.

Critic for USA Today, Kevin Nance called it a “massively entertaining, darkly funny new book, that goes a long way toward explaining why its author is finally securing her place alongside the greatest American novelists of the past half-century, including John Updike, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison and that other latter-day Dickensian, John Irving.”

The Goldfinch has also been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle prize and was in the top 40 on Amazon.com’s best seller list even before the Pulitzer was announced.

Tartt, a 50-year-old Mississippi native, is the author of the 1992 break-out classic The Secret History. Her follow-up a decade later, The Little Friend was a disappointment to fans. But they were rewarded for their patience. Eleven years later, Tartt returned with The Goldfinch. The Pulitzer will likely ensure her place among the elite of contemporary fiction writers and make The Goldfinch a blockbuster.

The Washington Post and The Guardian have won the Pulitzer Prize in public service for revealing the US government’s sweeping surveillance efforts in stories based on thousands of secret documents handed over by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

The Pulitzer for breaking news has been awarded to The Boston Globe for its coverage of the deadly Boston Marathon bombing.

The awards, announced on Monday, are American journalism’s highest honour.

The winning entries about the NSA’s spy programs showed the US government has collected information about millions of Americans’ phone calls and emails based on its classified interpretations of laws passed after the September 11 attacks.

The disclosures kicked off a massive debate in the US over privacy versus security and led President Barack Obama to impose limits on the surveillance.

Buy a copy of Goldfinch from here. 

– with AAP