Colson Whitehead's wins Pulitzer prize

Colson Whitehead's celebrated novel The Underground Railroad has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The novel had last year received the National Book Award of the US. This is for the first time in more than 20 years that the same work won the Pulitzer and National Book Award for fiction. The novel is about an escaped slave that combined liberating imagination and brutal



reality.

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.