Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead (2014)

Colson Whitehead (born 1969 in New York City ) is an American writer. He received the National Book Award in 2016 for his novel The Underground Railroad and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017, as well as the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award ; In 2020 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again for The Nickel Boys , which had only been the case with three writers before him in the more than 100-year history of the prize.

Life

Whitehead grew up in an upper middle class family in Manhattan and attended the renowned Trinity School . He then studied at Harvard University . After graduating in 1991, he wrote for The Village Voice for two years . He has taught at Princeton University , the University of Houston , Columbia University , Brooklyn College , Hunter College and Wesleyan University , and has been writer-in-residence at Vassar College , the University of Richmond and the University of Wyoming .

Whitehead has published six novels, numerous essays and a meditation on life in Manhattan in the style of EB White's famous essay "Here Is New York".

In 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Whitehead is married with two children.

reception

Esquire magazine named The Intuitionist Best First Novel of the Year, and GQ named the book one of the "Novels of the Millennium." John Updike reviewed “The Intuitionist” for The New Yorker , calling Whitehead “sparkling with spirit,” “strikingly primal,” adding, “The new young African American writer to watch might be a thirty-one year old Harvard graduate with the name Colson Whitehead. "

Whitehead's non-fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times , Granta Books, and Harper's Magazine . In 2012 he wrote the essay A Psychotronic Childhood for The New Yorker about his love for B-movies. He is a poker player and his book about the 2011 World Series of Poker , The Noble Hustle - Poker, Beef Jerky & Death , was published in 2014.

His novel The Underground Railroad was in Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of five books on his summer vacation reading list.

The novel Die Nickel Boys shows “analytically precise” , “how fatally power, shame and powerlessness work together”, the FAZ reviewer discusses the book about the cruel, racist everyday life in a US juvenile prison called Nickel .

The Austrian writer Karl-Markus Gauß judged that Whitehead is an author "one who can only wonder why it is translated into German at all and why even major publishers ruin themselves in the fight for licenses for its crap". Even the writer Elke Schmitter did n't leave a “good hair” on him in the mirror . Sandra Kegel, on the other hand, wrote about Whitehead's novel Zone One : "His condensed prose sparkles poetically like a dark star ."

Works

  • The intuitionist. Novel. 1999.
  • John Henry Days. Novel. 2001.
  • The Colossus of New York. 2003.
    • The Colossus of New York. A city in thirteen parts . Translation of Nikolaus Stingl. Hanser, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-446-20592-6 .
  • Apex Hides the Hurt. Novel. 2006.
  • Say Harbor. Novel. 2009.
  • Zone One. Novel. 2011.
  • The Underground Railroad. Novel. Doubleday, New York City 2016, ISBN 978-0-385-54236-4 .
  • The Nickel Boys . Novel. Doubleday, New York City 2019

literature

  • Michael Basseler: Cultural Memory and Trauma in the Contemporary Afro-American Novel. Theoretical foundation, forms of expression, development tendencies. Scientific publishing house Trier, Trier 2008, ISBN 978-3-86821-013-2 .
  • Holger Wacker: Zone One. In: Quarber Mercury . Franz Rottensteiner's literary magazine for science fiction and fantasy. Volume 114, 2013, ISBN 978-3-934273-93-1 , pp. 256-259.

Web links

Commons : Colson Whitehead  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Wieland Freund : double winner. In: The Literary World . April 15, 2017, p. 28.
  2. ^ Colson Whitehead. Colsonwhitehead.com, archived from the original on March 6, 2008 ; Retrieved March 18, 2008 .
  3. ↑ 2020 newly elected members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 6, 2020 .
  4. ^ Colson Whitehead: A Psychotronic Childhood . In: The New Yorker . May 28, 2012, ISSN  0028-792X ( newyorker.com [accessed December 10, 2018]).
  5. ↑ Colson Whitehead's new novel , FAZ review, published and accessed June 7, 2019
  6. ↑ K.-M. Gauss: Everyday life in the world. Two years and many more . Vienna 2015, p. 133.
  7. ↑ Sandra Kegel: Review . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 18, 2014, p. 10. PDF on the joint library network (GBV)
  8. ↑ Martin Ebel: How slaves escaped their fate. about the book
personal data
SURNAME Whitehead, Colson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1969
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City