Colson Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of six novels, including his debut work, the 1999 novel The Intuitionist, and The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
We air highlights from our conversation with Colson Whitehead about his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, from our virtual Get Lit with All Of It event.
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Colson Whitehead’s latest novel is based on a real juvenile detention reformatory in 1960s Florida. He joins host Krys Boyd to talk about his story of two boys, bound by the trauma around them as they swing between hope and cynicism. Earlier this year, “The Nickel Boys” earned Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize.
Colson Whitehead talks about his novel The Underground Railroad with James Naughtie and readers
The novel is a devastating and imaginative account of a young slave's bid for freedom from a brutal Georgian plantation in the American South. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast among the slaves and as she approaches womanhood is at greater risk of abuse from the owners. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to escape to the North
Colson Whitehead explains how the history of the Underground Railroad is taught in American schools, although it's a metaphor for the escape networks that ran in the antebellum South, as a child he understood it was real. so in the novel the idea assumes a physical form: a dilapidated boxcar pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can
At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world, where she must overcome obstacles as she makes her way to true freedom; reflecting, Colson says, the epic journeys from Homer and also Gulliver's Travels.
And as Colson Whitehead recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, the novel weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day
The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a place on Obama’s summer reading list, and was included in Oprah's book club.
To take part in future Bookclubs email bookclub@bbc.co.uk
Presenter : James Naughtie
Producer : Dymphna Flynn
November's Bookclub Choice : Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding (1996)
Colson Whitehead discusses his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad.
Creator Details
Birthdate
Nov 6th, 1969
Episode Count
8
Podcast Count
6
Total Airtime
4 hours, 24 minutes
PCID
485964