The acclaimed slavery novel has been rewarded alongside Lynn Nottage’s factory drama Sweat and Matthew Desmond’s nonfiction work Evicted

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead review – luminous, furious and wildly inventive Read more

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“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,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

colson whitehead (@colsonwhitehead) Giddy-up, motherfucker!

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.



Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers. </s> Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” his celebrated novel about an escaped slave that combined liberating imagination and brutal reality, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The announcement confirmed the book as the literary event of 2016, an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and critical favorite which last fall received the National Book Award, the first time in more than 20 years that the same work won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for fiction.

Whitehead, known for such explorations of American myth and history as “John Henry Days,” conceived his novel with what he calls a “goofy idea:” Take the so-called Underground Railroad of history, the network of escape routes to freedom, and make it an actual train. He wove his fantasy together with a too-believable story of a young girl’s flight from a plantation.

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Whitehead finished “The Underground Railroad” well before Donald Trump’s election but now finds parallels with the present. “I think the book deals with white supremacy as a foundational error in the country’s history and that foundational error is being played out now in the White House,” he told The Associated Press.

“When I was writing the book I wasn’t thinking about current events, but I think you have to look at it differently now.”

Other winners announced also touched upon race and class, in the present and in the past. Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat,” which won for drama, explores how the shutdown of a Pennsylvania factory leads to the breakdown of friendship and family, and a devastating cycle of violence, prejudice, poverty and drugs.

The play marks Nottage’s Broadway debut and her second Pulitzer Prize. She is the writer of “Intimate Apparel,” ”By The Way, Meet Vera Stark” and “Ruined,” which also won the Pulitzer.

“I was looking at how poverty and economic stagnation was beginning to shift our American narrative and how a culture was crying out,” Nottage told the AP after her win.

“I’m very honored. I’m in a bit of a daze.”

The history winner, Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” examines the events that unfolded starting September 9, 1971, when nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment.

The work reveals the crimes committed during the uprising and its aftermath, who committed them, and how they were covered up.

The general nonfiction winner was Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” set in Milwaukee and praised by the Pulitzer board as “a deeply researched expose that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty.”

Desmond, who last month won a National Book Critics Circle award, said that he hoped his book would illuminate both the severity of the crisis and the role of government.

“You look at a public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home,” he told the AP.

“Both are government subsidised, but they don’t look anything alike. We seem a lot more willing to spend money on tax write-offs than on direct assistance.”

Hisham Matar’s “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between” won for biography/autobiography; the Pulitzer board said that Matar’s memoir about his native Libya “examines with controlled emotion the past and present of an embattled region.”

Tyehimba Jess’ “Oilo” was the poetry winner, cited for melding performance art with poetry “to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity.”

The Pulitzer board gave the music award to Du Yun’s “Angel’s Bone” and called it a “bold” work which “integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.” </s> Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," his celebrated novel about an escaped slave that combined liberating imagination and brutal reality, has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Monday's announcement confirmed the book as the literary event of 2016, an Oprah Winfrey book club pick and critical favorite which last fall received the National Book Award, the first time in more than 20 years that the same work won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for fiction. Whitehead, known for such explorations of American myth and history as "John Henry Days," conceived his novel with what he calls a "goofy idea:" Take the so-called Underground Railroad of history, the network of escape routes to freedom, and make it an actual train. He wove his fantasy together with a too-believable story of a young girl's flight from a plantation.

Whitehead finished "The Underground Railroad" well before Donald Trump's election but now finds parallels with the present.

"I think the book deals with white supremacy as a foundational error in the country's history and that foundational error is being played out now in the White House," he told The Associated Press on Monday. "When I was writing the book I wasn't thinking about current events, but I think you have to look at it differently now."

Other winners announced Monday also touched upon race and class, in the present and in the past.

Lynn Nottage's "Sweat," which won for drama, explores how the shutdown of a Pennsylvania factory leads to the breakdown of friendship and family, and a devastating cycle of violence, prejudice, poverty and drugs. The play marks Nottage's Broadway debut and her second Pulitzer Prize. She is the writer of "Intimate Apparel," ''By The Way, Meet Vera Stark" and "Ruined," which also won the Pulitzer.

"I was looking at how poverty and economic stagnation was beginning to shift our American narrative and how a culture was crying out," Nottage told the AP after her win Monday. "I'm very honored. I'm in a bit of a daze."

The history winner, Heather Ann Thompson's "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy," examines the events that unfolded starting Sept. 9, 1971, when nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. The work reveals the crimes committed during the uprising and its aftermath, who committed them, and how they were covered up.

Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan, was teaching her second class of the day when her cellphone awakened with a call from her book agent about the win. Her students burst into applause.

Thompson said she was most happy that survivors of the uprising and subsequent brutal crackdown were able to have their stories told after more than four decades.

"Beyond Attica, I'm hoping that it also shines a light on inside these correctional facilities, of which we have more in this country than any other country on the planet," she said. "I hope it reminds us that the 2.5 million people that are locked up in a correctional facility are human beings."

The general nonfiction winner was Matthew Desmond's "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," set in Milwaukee and praised by the Pulitzer board as "a deeply researched expose that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty." Desmond, who last month won a National Book Critics Circle award, said Monday that he hoped his book would illuminate both the severity of the crisis and the role of government.

"You look at a public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home," he told the AP. "Both are government subsidized, but they don't look anything alike. We seem a lot more willing to spend money on tax write-offs than on direct assistance."

Hisham Matar's "The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between" won for biography/autobiography; the Pulitzer board said Monday that Matar's memoir about his native Libya "examines with controlled emotion the past and present of an embattled region." Tyehimba Jess' "Olio" was the poetry winner, cited for melding performance art with poetry "to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity."

The Pulitzer board gave the music award to Du Yun's "Angel's Bone" and called it a "bold" work which "integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world."

Yun had just returned from a day of panels at The Culture Summit in Abu Dhabi, and her librettist Royce Vavrek texted her the good news, which arrived close to midnight for Yun. She said that it was great to hear after a day of learning "how to use art and make art ... to advance cultural change" at The Culture Summit.

"I met a lot of people who work intensively with refugees and human trafficking, which was the top of my work," Yun said. "We just had this intense conversation about how to really use art to affect policies."

Associated Press writers Lynn Elber in Los Angeles and Mark Kennedy and Mesfin Fekadu in New York contributed to this report.

Predictions for this year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction </s> Colson Whitehead won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in fiction Monday for “The Underground Railroad.” It caps a sweep of accolades that the book has received since its publication by Doubleday in August 2016, including winning the National Book Award in November and being selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

The Pulitzer committee praised “The Underground Railroad” as “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 Underground Railroad” took Whitehead 16 years to write. He received a MacArthur fellowship in 2002.

In her review of the book, Los Angeles Times critic-at-large Rebecca Carroll wrote that it is “a fiercely salient reckoning of what it means, has meant and continues to mean to be black in America” and noted that “’the Underground Railroad’ could not be more timely and necessary.”

The two finalists in fiction were “Imagine Me Gone” by Adam Haslett and “The Sport of Kings” by C.E. Morgan.

“The Underground Railroad’s” win marks the Pulitzer Prizes’ 101st year . A complete list of winners and finalists can be found on the Pulitzer website. </s> Literary blockbuster novel The Underground Railroad, which depicts the journey of a young woman escaping from slavery via a fantastical train system, has won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.

Author Colson Whitehead has collected multiple accolades for the bestselling book, including last year’s National Book Award. Moonlight director Barry Jenkins is adapting the story into a limited series for Amazon.

“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,” read the Pulitzer judges’ note about Whitehead’s win.

The author reacted to the news on Twitter:

The Pulitzer prizes, considered the most prestigious journalism and arts awards in the country, were announced on Wednesday afternoon at Columbia University in New York.

Playwright Lynn Nottage nabbed her second Pulitzer for the drama Sweat, a Broadway play about factory workers battling job cuts.

Author Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction award for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a book about housing inequality and evictions, and Hisham Matar won the biography prize for The Return, his book on his missing father in Libya.

Bestseller When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, the autobiography of a dying surgeon, was a runner-up in the biography category.



Tyehimba Jess won the poetry award for his work Olio.

In the journalism awards, New York Daily News and ProPublica jointly nabbed the top award, for public service, for their investigation into the New York police department evicting people, mostly minorities, from their homes.

“We are not in a period of decline in journalism. Rather, we are in the midst of a revolution,” Pulitzer prize administrator Mike Pride said during the award ceremony.

David A Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the national reporting award for his coverage of the lack of promised donations by the Trump Foundation during the election. He regularly tweeted his news-gathering techniques, a photo of a crammed notepad listing organizations he had called showing the scale of the issue.

California’s East Bay Times nabbed the breaking news Pulitzer for its coverage of the Oakland fire at a warehouse that killed 36 people.

Hilton Als of the New Yorker won the criticism award, Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail took home the investigative award for his reporting on opioids in West Virginia, and the New York Times garnered the international reporting award for its coverage of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald won the explanatory reporting award for its work on the Panama Papers. </s> Current Broadway play “Sweat” has scored playwright Lynn Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize for Drama, with the award this year going to a show that has proven a timely look at a group of working-class friends in a declining factory town.

Nottage, who conducted interviews and research into the declining community of Reading, Penn., as inspiration for the play, previously picked up the 2009 drama Pulitzer for “Ruined,” her drama set in the Congo. Also among the list of Pulitzer winners was New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als, winning the award for criticism, as well as Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” bagging the fiction prize.

The two finalists for the drama prize were “The Wolves,” Sarah DeLappe’s bracing story of a girl’s soccer team, and “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” Taylor Mac’s ambitious, 24-hour cycle of American musical throughout the nation’s lifespan. </s> The Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been awarded to Sweat, by Lynn Nottage. The play was recognized as a nuanced yet powerful drama that reminds audiences of the stacked deck still facing workers searching for the American dream. Sweat is currently playing on Broadway at Studio 54, after a sold-out run at the Public Theater and previous productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and D.C.’s Arena Stage, who together co-commissioned the piece originally. In the video below, Nottage speaks with PBS NewsHour about this important American drama, which she began working on in 2011 but today has taken on an incredible timeliness. </s> New York Daily News And ProPublica Win Pulitzer For Public Service Journalism

Writers, editors and artists took home Pulitzer Prizes across 21 categories on Monday. Among the winners was author Colson Whitehead for his novel, The Underground Railroad. </s> UPDATE with more information and interview with Nottage.

Lynn Nottage won her second Pultizer Prize for Drama today, winning the award for Sweat, a drama set in a Pennsylvania factory town ravaged by changing economics and the social forces that culminated with the November election of Donald Trump. The play, staged by Kate Whoriskey, opened earlier this month on Broadway.

“Sharp and threatening as a box cutter blade, Lynn Nottage’s drama Sweat opened last fall at the Public Theater shortly before the election, an unnervingly prescient reality check even before Donald Trump’s victory,” I wrote in the review for Deadline. ” ‘No play in recent memory has shed more light on the crises and tribulations of America’s great retrenched working middle class,’ I wrote then, and that remains true these five tumultuous months later.”

In 2009, Nottage won the prize for her play Ruined, about the enforced sexual slavery of women during the civil war in the Republic of Congo.

“I’m excited that I can bring the conversation which is neccesary to the main stage,” Notttage told Deadline this afternoon in a telephone interview after the announcement. “The economic devsatation affecting the culture as a whole and raising awaareness for smoe folks who were relutctant to engage in this converstation.”

Asked about the response she’s seen from audiences, Nottage said, “From my point of view, the audience reaction has been tremendous. The curtain comes down and they’re hit for a moment, which is as I wanted it to be – a dialogue startrer that then people could conjure with. Reading is a bedrock of our culture being destroyed.”

Sweat marks the second Pulitzer for a playwright committed to art as a vehicle for social awareness. “I hold onto Werner Herzog’s notion that the job of the artist is to keep your eyes open when everyone else’s are shut. sometimes what you see ist beautiful and sometimes it’s ugly, and the artist shouldn’t be afraid to hold that mirror.”

The Pulitzer Prize for criticism was awarded for the second year in a row to a critic from The New Yorker magazine. The recipient is drama critic Hilton Als. Last year, the criticism award went to television critic Emily Nussbaum. The 2016 prizes marked the first time the awardsm which were established to honor daily newspaper print journalism, were opened up to magazine journalists.

Mike Pride, administrator of the Pultizers, began the announcements this afternoon from Columbia University with an Oscars joke, ad libbing, “Just making sure I have the right envelope.”

The Pultizers are the most coveted awards in print and, mpre recently, online journalism and among the most coveted in the arts; this year the cash value of the prizes was raised to $15,000 from $10,000. The top journalism award, the Gold Medal for Public Service, was awarded to the New York Daily News and Pro Publica, an independent investigative group that works with established papers, for a series on the NYPD’s use of a decades-old law to force people from their homes and businesses over alleged illegal activity.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Sweat by Lynn Nottage win the Pultizer Prizes for Fiction and Drama respectively.