The combustible mix of sex and politics turned the heads of judges in this year's prestigious Pulitzer Prizes, the highest honours in American journalism announced in New York last night.

The top investigative reporting award went to Nigel Jaquiss, a former Wall Street stockbroker who swapped the high life to work on Williamette Week, a newspaper in Portland Oregon. He won the award for disclosing the past sexual misconduct of former Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt with a 14 year-old girl while he was mayor in the 1970s.

Another local paper, the Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey, won for breaking news coverage for stories about the resignation of its state governor James McGreevey after he admitted to cheating on his wife with a male lover.

Editor Jim Willse said the paper had as many as 100 people working on the story. "We threw everything we had at it," he said.

The Los Angeles Times won two prizes; the public service award, the most highly regarded category, for exposing deadly medical problems and racial injustice at an inner-city hospital, and for the paper's international coverage from Russia and its struggles with terrorism, its economy and political system by Kim Murphy.

The judges praised the LA Times for its "courageous, exhaustively researched series" on the hospital. This was a second successful year in a row for the paper which won five awards in 2004.

Prize winners get cheques for $10,000.

The Wall Street Journal also did well in this year's awards, matching the LA Times with two awards.

The paper's film critic Joe Morgenstern won in the criticism category while Amy Dockser Marcus won for best beat reporting for her writing on cancer survivors.

Among the other awards, the Associated Press won for its breaking news photography for its images of the conflict still claiming lives in Iraq.

The New York Times' Walt Bogdanich won the award for best national reporting for his articles on the corporate cover-up of responsibility for fatal rail accidents.

Gareth Cook of the Boston Globe won the prize for explanatory writing for his coverage of the controversial issue of stem cell research while Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune won best feature writing for her account of a deadly tornado.

In the literary sectors, the prize for fiction went to Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The book, her second novel, tells the story of a 76-year-old preacher assessing his life as his health fails.

The prize for drama went to Doubt, a Parable by John Patrick Shanley and the prize for history was awarded to David Hackett Fischer for Washington's Crossing.

The award for biography went to Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan for de Kooning: An American Master.