Pulitzer prize officials awarded the fiction award to an author with a long history in fantasy, horror and young adult novels: Daniel Kraus, cited for Angel Down, a first world war narrative that unfolds in one long sentence. Liberation, Bess Wohl’s look back at the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, received the drama prize.

Winners announced on Monday included two books rooted in the founding of the US. Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the US Constitution won for history, and Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution was the winner for biography.

Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, her blunt account of the suicides of her two sons, was cited for memoir-autobiography. Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America won for general nonfiction.

The poetry prize went to Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poeticas, and the music award was given to Gabriela Lena Frank for Picaflor: A Future Myth, a symphonic work inspired by Andean legend and California wildfires.

The 50-year-old Kraus has had a diverse and prolific career that includes collaborations with film-makers George Romero and Guillermo del Toro. Pulitzer officials praised Angel Down as “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism and science fiction into a cohesive whole, told in a single sentence”.

Wohl’s memory play collects second-wave feminists from all walks of life as they tackle misogyny, internalized homophobia, domestic abuse and gender roles. The play navigates between past and present, and six of the actors disrobe for the act two opening scene. The win comes a day before the Tony award nominations, when Liberation is expected to be named in the best new play category.

The Guardian’s Adrian Horton praised Liberation in a four-star review.

“The play offers no concrete answers; one’s personal politics and choices remain, as ever, a thicket of contradictions,” she wrote. “Liberation finds, in that, an immutable and potent grief – for the costs of our failings, for all that’s been lost, for the questions we thought too late to ask. But that doesn’t mean, as this provocative play suggests, that we shouldn’t still ask them.”