The Boston Globe won the breaking news prize for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and wounded at least 260. Tuesday is the first anniversary of the blast.

In the literature categories, the fiction prize went to Donna Tartt for “The Goldfinch,” which was described by the Pulitzer committee as “a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters that follows a grieving boy’s entanglement with a small famous painting.”

The New York Times won two awards, both for photography. Tyler Hicks won the breaking news photography prize for his coverage of a terrorist attack at an upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that left more than 60 people dead. Josh Haner won the feature photography award for his images of the painstaking recovery of a Boston Marathon bombing survivor.

Also notable this year was the absence of a prize in the feature writing category. The decision was “not a comment on a state of feature writing,” said Sig Gissler, the administrator of the prizes for Columbia University. The rules require that an entry get a majority vote from the committee, he said. The three finalists “after careful consideration,” he said, did not get there. The decision was not unique, Mr. Gissler said. In 2012 there was no award for fiction, for an 11th time in that category’s history. No feature writing award was given in 2004.