Author, screenwriter and producer David Simon, best-known as the creator of The Wire ("the best show ever", according to the Guardian), has been officially recognised as a genius after landing a $500,000 (£320,000) MacArthur "genius" grant.

The no-strings-attached MacArthur fellowships, widely known as "genius" grants, are intended to allow their recipients "unprecedented freedom and opportunity to reflect, create, and explore" over the next five years. Simon is one of three writers to be named a MacArthur fellow this year, alongside novelist Yiyun Li and historian Annette

Gordon-Reed. The MacArthur Foundation chose 23 fellows in total, ranging from a quantum astrophysicist to a population geneticist, type designer, stone carver, jazz pianist and indigenous language preservationist.

"To be told you've won a MacArthur fellowship is very flattering and gratifying personally," said Simon, a former journalist and author of books including Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. "On a practical level I'm a TV producer and storyteller who's gone about as long as you can go without achieving a mass audience. I have no currency other than things, other than moments like this. I'll admit it. I can't go in and wave Emmy awards, I can't go in and wave Nielsen ratings when I try to get one of these stories told. I can, however, do these stories that actually are not so much about what's on the entertainment page but maybe about what's on the op ed. And maybe about what needs to be discussed rather than what's easy to discuss."

The MacArthur Foundation praised the writer for his television series Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Wire and current project Treme, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, for exploring "with the nuance and scope of novels [the] constraints that poverty, corruption, and broken social systems place on the lives of a compelling cast of characters, each vividly realised with complicated motives, frailties, and strengths".

Describing himself as a "storyteller", Simon said The Wire "was an opportunity to tell stories about where we are as a society using narrative fiction to make some of the arguments we would have made with journalism". "You're looking at ruminations on the end of empire, on what it is like for society to no longer have the will to pull itself as a whole, as a single entity, forwards. It is a recipe for the disenfranchisement of significant portions of the country and the divorce of one America from the other. And that's what we're exploring," he said.

Beijing-born Li, 37, is author of the story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers – winner of the Guardian First Book award – and the novel The Vagrants. Her "spare and quietly understated style of storytelling draws readers into powerful and emotionally compelling explorations of her characters' struggles, set both in China and the United States", said the MacArthur Foundation.

"Being granted the MacArthur fellowship really confirms that there are people out there who care about literature, who care about creativity, and it's a huge encouragement for me as a young writer," said Li, recently named one of the New Yorker's best "20 under 40" fiction writers.

The MacArthur fellows programme director, Daniel Socolow, said the 23 new fellows were all "explorers and pioneers at the cutting edge". "These are women and men improving, protecting, and making our world a better place for us all," he added. "This programme was designed for such people – designed to provide an extra measure of freedom, visibility, and opportunity."

Since the fellowship programme was launched in 1981, 827 people have been awarded grants, with other writers to have been selected including Cormac McCarthy and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.