IN DEPTH
Author Profile Colson Whitehead
A lauded but not very lucrative writing career was turned on its head for Colson Whitehead, after Pulitzer and National Book Award wins put his name in lights
Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan
C
olson Whitehead arrives at this Frankfurt Book Fair at the tail end of a touring schedule that would make Bruce Springsteen seem lazy. In the past year he has
been talking about his two most recent and much-fêted books, 2016’s The Underground Railroad and this year’s The Nickel Boys, at more than 90 events spanning 10 countries and 21 US states. It may be forgivable, then, if you catch his stint with Margaret Atwood and Elif Shafak at Friday night’s Literary Gala, and he opens with “Hello, Cleveland!” instead of “Guten Abend, Frankfurt.” Is he still enjoying the road? He says: “It’s all work. I’ve been going to a lot of nice places that I’ve never been before—but I have no time to see those places. But it has been great meeting up with old publishers, and ones I hadn’t worked with before at the start of a new sort of relationship which I hope to continue with in the future.” The Underground Railroad was, of course,Whitehead’s
big breakout. His previous five novels had been well reviewed and performed decently at the tills. But the book looking at slavery in the US through a genre-busting speculative lens—which posited that the network of safe houses which helped runaway slaves escape the South was an actual underground railway—put him into the stratosphere. In the US, it won both the Pulitzer Prize and
32 17th October 2019
When [protagonist] Elwood is picked up by police, it speaks to that random act of misfortune that could happen to anyone of colour
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