Aretha Franklin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize’s Special Citation, the prestigious journalism and the arts organization announced Monday.

Franklin was recognized “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades,” the Pulitzer Prize board added of the honour.

Franklin is one of less than a dozen musicians – and the first female artist – to receive the Pulitzers’ Special Citation for the arts; previous winners include Rodgers & Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and, most recently in 2010, Hank Williams.

Franklin, whose powerful voice, trained in the gospel tradition, moved on to embrace jazz, soul and rhythm and blues had won 18 Grammys, had 17 top 10 US chart hits and became the first woman admitted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Pulitzers also honour the best in literature, theatre, and journalism.

Jackie Sibblies Drury won the drama prize for “Fairview’’, a play which seems to be a black family comedy in the style of The Cosby Show or A Different World.

Similarly, novelist Richard Powers won the fiction prize for “The Overstory’’, a multi-narrative look at nine Americans who are brought together unfolding natural catastrophe.

While David Blight picked up the history prize for his acclaimed biography of Frederick Douglas, the escaped slave who became a leader of the abolitionist movement.