Advertisement In Lin-Manuel Mirandaâs world, writing is never just a form of self-expression. Words, strung together, can remake entire realities. Wield them a certain way and you have a revolutionary force. The playwright, actor and composer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Hamilton, the virtuosic musical that re-imagines the life of Alexander Hamilton, an orphan from the British West Indies who designed Americaâs central banking system. But he grew up the son of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York Cityâs Inwood, where over a third of the community is overseas-born, to a soundtrack of show tunes and hip-hop.