How Anand RK created the Pulitzer-winning graphic investigation of India’s digital arrest scams

Earlier in May, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary was awarded to trAPPed, a story about a neurologist from Lucknow who finds herself ensnared by a “digital arrest” cyberscam.

Sharing the byline with two investigative journalists is a comics artist who has depicted the invisible walls of that prison. Anand Radhakrishnan, known as Anand RK, was already a name to reckon with before this honour: conjurer of jazz-haunted nightmares, and a draftsman who can switch from the rain-slicked gullies of Mumbai to the outer reaches of a post-apocalyptic radio station without ever losing his grip on the emotional weather inside a panel, he was first Indian, in 2021, to win an Eisner.

The Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary was instituted only in 2022 to accommodate long-form visual reportage. But it has already built a distinctive record: it has honoured graphic investigations into state oppression, data visualisation that maps billionaire wealth, visual essays on incarceration, and editorial cartoons so fearless they cost a veteran her job.

That Anand, working from a home studio in Mumbai, sits comfortably in such company says much about the breadth of the career he has built. It also speaks to the steady, under-documented arrival of a generation of Indian artists in the bloodstream of American comics.

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