Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City,” an account of Bombay’s two-decade transformation, was beaten out yesterday for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction by Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,” an in-depth exposé of the CIA. Mehta’s book was a nominated finalist along with “The Devil’s Highway,” by Luis Alberto Urrea. Winners of the annual prize receive $10,000, and get to emboss a gold seal on the cover of their book. Pulitzers are administered by Columbia University, which gave the award’s highest honor to the Los Angeles Times for its series exposing medical problems and racial injustice at King/Drew Medical Center. A full list of winners is available on the award’s official web site. Past recipients of the prestigious award include Jhumpa Lahiri, David Mamet (I couldn’t resist), and a bunch of other folks. The first South Asian to capture the award was Gobind Behari Lal in 1937, for his coverage of science at Harvard University (via Sreenath Sreenivasan). Yep, we were science geeks even back in the 30s.