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‘Orphan Master’s Son’ wins Pulitzer for fiction

“The Orphan Master’s Son,” by Adam Johnson, a novel telling one character’s story inside North Korea, landed the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday — one year after the Pulitzer Committee had angered publishers by making no award for fiction at all in 2012.

Among publishers, Random House was the big winner this year; four of the five books honored with Pulitzers were imprints from the company.

The history Pulitzer went to “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam,” by Fredrick Logevall (Random House).

Best Drama went to “Disgraced,” by Ayad Akhtar, about a dinner party in which a successful corporate lawyer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is caught up in discussion of race, religion and his own Pakistani Muslim heritage that he had always tried to downplay.

The biography winner, “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo,” by Tom Reiss, was published by the Crown imprint of Random House, while the The poetry award went to “Stag’s Leap,” by Sharon Olds, published by the publisher’s Alfred A. Knopf imprint.

General Nonfiction went to Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America,” published by Harper imprint of HarperCollins. HarperCollins, like The Post, is owned by News Corp.

Although the Pulitzers are traditionally associated with newspaper awards, they actually have far more impact on the book world, where they can propel sales to many times pre-award levels.

“The Orphan Master’s Son” was definitely among a handful of books that was being tipped as a potential winner, but there was no clear-cut favorite this year, raising worries that no book would get a majority vote — as happened in 2012.

The Pulitzer committee cited Johnson’s book as an “exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.”

Johnson, 45, a writing professor at Stanford University, told USA Today that he hopes his win will focus more attention on what is happening inside the Korean totalitarian state today.

“North Koreans aren’t allowed to tell their own story,” he said. “Others have to do it for them.”

In the newspaper portion of the awards, the New York Times picked up four awards — including one to David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab for investigative reporting.

The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephen won for commentary. The Journal is also owned by News Corp.

kkelly@nypost.com