Colson Whitehead wins second Pulitzer Prize for fiction

Colson Whitehead.
(Image credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Author Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday for The Nickel Boys, a novel about young black men at an abusive reform school.

In 2017, Whitehead won in the same category for Underground Railroad, and he's now the fourth writer to twice win the Pulitzer for fiction, after Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike. The Pulitzer committee called The Nickel Boys 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."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.