A Second Pulitzer for Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys wins the 2020 prize for fiction.

Photograph of Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead
Photograph by Chris Close 

In 2017, Colson Whitehead ’91 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his harrowing novel The Underground Railroad, a story that translated that fraught effort to free enslaved people from a historic metaphor to an actual system of tracks and trains propelling Cora, his protagonist, on her northbound escape from slavery. Today Whitehead received a second Pulitzer for his equally harrowing novel The Nickel Boys, honored as “A spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.”

For more about Whitehead, read “A Literary Chameleon,” a profile from this magazine’s archives.

The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded to another Harvard affiliate, Jericho Brown, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2009-2010, for The Tradition, “A collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence.”

You might also like

Harvard Ramps Up Fundraising as Research Cuts Deepen

This week in the battle between Harvard and the Trump administration 

Plans for a Faculty Senate Move Forward

And annual awards for excellence in teaching, advising, mentoring, and scholarship

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Most popular

New Overseers and HAA Directors Announced

Alumni showed increased interest in this year’s elections.

International Student Ban Casts a Shadow on Harvard Commencement

Graduates discuss Trump's moves as students and alumni hold rallies

Explore More From Current Issue

Publications by Harvard Authors Spring 2025: New Releases

Operatic counterculture, a Passover graphic novel, James Joyce’s biographer, and more

Short Headlines from Harvard's History

Seniors’ uncertain future c. 1940, Harvard Law Review news, and more

Harvard Commencement and Alumni Events 2025

Harvard Commencement and Alumni Events 2025