Whitehead, Colson

Impact on the world

Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 for 'The Underground Railroad,' which reimagines the Underground Railroad as a literal subterranean rail network, then won it again in 2020 for 'The Nickel Boys,' based on a real Jim Crow-era Florida reform school where investigators later uncovered unmarked graves; he became only the fourth writer in the prize's history to win twice for fiction, and the first to do so for consecutive books.

Life & background

Raised in Manhattan and educated at Harvard, where he joined the Dark Room Collective of young Black writers, Whitehead built a literary career exploring race and American history through genre-blending fiction, beginning with his acclaimed 1999 debut 'The Intuitionist.' His 2016 novel 'The Underground Railroad' reimagined the historic network of escape routes as an actual underground railway, following an enslaved woman's escape from a Georgia plantation; the novel won the National Book Award and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was selected for Oprah's Book Club. His 2019 follow-up, 'The Nickel Boys,' based on the real history of Florida's Dozier School for Boys, where forensic researchers later uncovered unmarked graves of abused students, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Whitehead the fourth writer ever to win the fiction prize twice and the first to do so in consecutive eligible cycles. He received a MacArthur Fellowship, appeared on Time magazine's cover as 'America's Storyteller,' and received the National Humanities Medal from President Biden in 2021.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Harvard Gazette; The Pulitzer Prizes