Written by Anushree Majumdar |Updated: January 29, 2019 1:55:51 am
The Pulitzer put me in a good mood for a year: Colson Whitehead
Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, Colson Whitehead, on his award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, White guilt and his new book.
It’s been two years since Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Underground Railroad, a novel that acts as an alternate history about two slaves, Cora and Caesar, who seek freedom from the Georgia plantation they live and work in. They follow an underground railway network consisting of a train, secret routes and safe houses, till they can reach the northern states where slavery has been abolished. At the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, Whitehead, 49, isn’t one to go on about his work; he speaks succinctly and makes himself heard in panels where five other authors are asked the same questions.
In this conversation, he chats about his multi-award-winning book, shrugs off White guilt, and is looking forward to his new novel:
You grew up reading fantasy as a kid, and you’ve said that it wanted to make you write. Who and what were you reading?
I was reading Marvel comics, X-Men, Spiderman…
Who, as a journalist, never had to file a single story.
Haha! Actually, no, he was trying to get his pictures published so that he could pay his rent. That was my first acquaintance with the freelancer hustle, living cheque to cheque. But to go back to who I was reading, Stephen King’s The Stand and Carrie; writing stories about monsters seemed like a nice job. I also read Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven, Ursula K LeGuin. My earliest memories include watching The Twilight Zone on TV and The Underground Railroad is that kind of story too. Cora lives in reality, and then gets on a train and finds herself in an alternative world. Fantasy has always been one of the many tools we have to talk about reality.
What are the dangers of turning something metaphorical like an underground network of people into something mechanical and tangible like an actual train?
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario