A young New York composer, violinist and vocalist has won an award usually reserved for her older colleagues. Thirty year-old Caroline Shaw has won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 voices, a piece she composed for her a cappella vocal group, Roomful of Teeth. The Pulitzer judges called the work “highly polished and inventive … uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies, and novel vocal effects.”

Other Pulitzers have been announced.

After deciding not to award a fiction prize for the first time in decades last year, judges picked Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son as this year’s winner.

And Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced won the Pulitzer for Drama.