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Whitehead wins 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Colson Whitehead has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Underground Railroad (Sphere), becoming the seventh author to win the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for the same book.

The judges described the book 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 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction went to Matthew Desmond for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Penguin)—‘a deeply researched exposé that showed how mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash were less a consequence than a cause of poverty’.

In other categories, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Heather Ann Thompson, Pantheon US) won for history, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Hisham Matar, Viking) for biography/autobiography and Olio (Tyehimba Jess, Wave Books) for poetry.

To view the full list of winners and finalists, click here.

 

Category: International news