Whitehead Wins Pulitzer

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Doubleday) won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in the Fiction category, announced April 10, 2017. The award, given for “distinguished fiction published in book form during the year by an American author, preferably dealing with American life,” comes with a prize of $15,000.

The Pulitzer jury chose The Underground Railroad for “a smart melding of realism and allegory that combines the violence of slavery and the drama of escape in a myth that speaks to contemporary America.”

The winners will be honored at a luncheon in late May at Columbia University’s Low Library in New York NY. For more information and a list of other finalists, see the Pulitzer website.