A Fairfield native has won one of literature’s most prestigious honors. Daniel Kraus, 50, who grew up in Fairfield before attending the University of Iowa, was awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 2025 novel “Angel Down” — a World War I story with fantastical and science fiction elements, written entirely in one continuous sentence across nearly 300 pages. There is no period anywhere in the novel.
The now Chicago-based writer and screenwriter crafted a narrative that follows five soldiers crossing No Man’s Land toward a rumored German stronghold, where they find not an enemy battalion but a fallen angel tangled in the wire. The structure of the novel — one unbroken sentence from first word to last — mirrors the relentless forward grind of the story itself. Kraus told the Associated Press that he had first attempted a conventional narrative but found that a story of war with seemingly no end demanded a form that had no end either. “It’s like you have the feeling of being locked into the book forever,” he said.
Pulitzer Prize judges called the novel “a stylistic tour-de-force that blends such genres as allegory, magical realism, and science fiction into a cohesive whole.”
Kraus said the award came as a complete shock. “It was a complete out of left field surprise. It wasn’t something that was on my mind,” he told Iowa’s News Now anchor Mitch Fick. He recalled initially being confused when texts started pouring in. “I thought I had done something bad when I started hearing from people. You just started getting texts and I was like, ‘Well, is that a good wow? Is that a bad wow?'”
The single-sentence structure was a deliberate artistic choice rooted in the book’s themes. Kraus said he wanted the form to reflect the cycle of war itself. “One of the themes was how World War I was the war that kind of trapped us in this cycle of wars forever,” he said. “I thought maybe there’s a way to structure this book like a wheel — I could write the whole thing in one sentence and the last sentence connects to the first sentence. So you’re trapped in the book forever.”
It was a significant gamble. Angel Down was Kraus’s 25th book, and he said it was the first time since his debut that he felt genuinely nervous about a manuscript. “I hadn’t told my editor that I was writing it this way. I thought the concept might be intimidating to people,” he said. His editor embraced it immediately — a relief Kraus said he did not take for granted. “I thought I’d possibly ruined my career.”
Roots in Fairfield
Kraus credits his childhood in Fairfield with shaping him as a storyteller. Growing up in a small town before the internet, he said the relative quiet left room for creativity that might otherwise have been crowded out. He spent hours writing alone in his basement and became a regular at Adventureland Video, a local rental store where he gravitated toward the horror section.
“There were probably 50 movies in the horror section and I must have studied every single one of those VHS boxes — I would be afraid to rent them and eventually would rent them,” he said. He noted that Fairfield’s limited entertainment options — a movie theater and a mini golf place among the highlights — were actually a blessing in disguise. “There weren’t a lot of things clamoring for our attention, but the upside to that is that it just left room for a lot of creativity. I would just write for hours on end, alone in my room in the basement, and that was super fun for me.”
A key part of his childhood was the VHS boom that hit right as he was coming of age in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. He had a mother who was fairly permissive about what he could rent, which opened the door to a wide range of films — including plenty that were not exactly age-appropriate. “I watched all sorts of inappropriate stuff on a weekly basis and it was the best thing I could have done,” he said. “It really just opened my eyes to art.”
He described the horror genre as something that helped him build resilience during a difficult stretch of his childhood. “I was using horror as a means to toughen myself up a bit because I had some tough times as a kid. It was a way of mastering something that made me feel like I was kind of tough — I was able to pull together a suit of armor out of all this stuff.” He added that the confidence he gained from consuming material that his peers — including those who bullied him — could not have handled gave him a sense of ownership and control he might not have found elsewhere.
From Fairfield, Kraus went on to the University of Iowa, where he got involved in the film program and initially pursued that path before returning to his first love — writing novels. He said the solo nature of writing was always a better fit for his personality than the collaborative world of filmmaking. “I really missed that feeling of being alone and working on something and just hammering away at it. I guess I’m probably a bit of a hermit.”
When asked what 10-year-old Daniel in the horror corner of Adventureland Video would think of all this, Kraus was reflective. “It would be beyond comprehension,” he said. “Writing as a profession, as a possibility — it wasn’t a reality around us. There were no working artists. It was never something I thought was going to happen. But I think he would be very happy.” He added that he would not tell his younger self what was coming. “He’s got to go through the things he went through. You’ve got to build up to it. It’s all the mistakes and the wrong turns that build you into who you are.”
A Career Built on Range and Collaboration
Kraus has written more than two dozen novels across nearly every genre, including work for children, comics, and graphic novels. His career has been defined by genre-hopping — horror, science fiction, graphic novels, children’s books — and by high-profile collaborations with filmmakers. He co-wrote the novelization of “The Shape of Water” with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, the film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2018, and completed the final unfinished novel of legendary horror director George Romero after his death in 2017 — an experience Kraus called one of the most meaningful of his career. “George was my favorite artist, period, in any sort of art or film,” he said. “To write the final zombie story of the person whose first zombie story had sort of started me as an artist felt like a real closing of a circle.”
A film adaptation of his 2023 novel “Whalefall” — starring Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams — is set for release in October through 20th Century, and “Angel Down” was greenlit for a film adaptation in January. Both films are being produced by Imagine Entertainment. Kraus said he has also taken on screenwriting work and is finding a balance he enjoys, though he is clear about where his heart lies. “I’ll always be a novelist first. That’s where my heart is.”
Kraus graduated from the University of Iowa in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in communication studies.
