Boston Globe journalist, Sebastian Smee, was sitting on a beach in Miami a few months ago with his wife Jo when he heard he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for Art Criticism.

"I certainly didn’t expect it," Australian-born Smee says. "I got a call from Marty Baron, my editor, and I started chatting away to him when he said: ‘I’m just calling you to tell you that you won the Pulitzer.’"

Already the award – the most prestigious journalism and arts accolade in the US, with 21 recipients announced in April each year – has affected Smee’s career prospects; he’s been offered various public speaking engagements and appearances on TV shows to talk about art.

Smee is very content at the Globe and has no plans to look for a new role any time soon, although he has moved around a lot in the past.

After graduating from the University of Sydney with a Fine Arts degree, Smee worked as an art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald for four years. Then he moved to London and freelanced for publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian.

The couple moved back to Sydney in 2004 to have their first child, and Smee became The Australian’s national art critic before being offered The Boston Globe position in 2008.

His Australian upbringing has left an indelible imprint on 38-year-old Smee’s outlook. "Australians have this adventurous spirit; a sense of curiosity and connection with the rest of the world, always looking for opportunities. As an art critic, I can’t help but be like that," he says. "Also, most Australians seem to have good bullshit detectors and that’s been a really helpful thing in the art world."

While Smee spends most of his time now writing about international art, he retains a passion for Australian art, including artists such as Bill Henson, Dale Frank, Gareth Sansom, Elisabeth Cummings, Joe Furlonger, Fiona Hall, Geoffrey de Groen, John Mawurndjul, Brett McMahon and Tonee Messiah.

"The contemporary scene in Australia is vibrant, by any standards. I miss it," he says. "Australian art is fascinating in a world context for a whole bunch of different reasons. Landscape, and the originality of our artists’ response to it, is just one of those reasons, but it’s a big one. Fred Williams, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Streeton deserve to be much better known outside Australia, in my opinion. It’s hard to make grandiose claims because the art world is increasingly decentralised and there are superb artists from all over. But if you like to get nationalistic about these things, there’s good reason to be proud."